Escrivá: “La flexibilidad y la innovación fueron claves del éxito de las medidas para proteger el empleo durante la pandemia”

The Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, José Luis Escrivá, spoke on Tuesday in the plenary session of the Ministerial Meeting on Employment and Work of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which is held until Friday in Paris under the title “Beyond the COVID-19 crisis, towards a better job market that works for all”. The Minister of Inclusion acts as Vice-President of this meeting.

During his speech at the plenary session with which the Ministerial Meeting began, entitled ‘Maximizing Resilience: Learning from the Most Effective Policies to Cushion Future Economic Crises’, Escrivá highlighted “the importance of innovation in the design of policies to respond to the pandemic”.

In Spain, this resulted in the expansion of the figure of the ERTE, initially designed for large industrial corporations and which saved millions of jobs in small and medium-sized enterprises, the benefits for self-employed workers or the deployment of the Minimum Vital Income, a structural measure foreseen but advanced due to the pandemic.

In addition, the Minister of Inclusion has valued “the adaptation of these measures to the different stages throughout the pandemic”. In this regard, he explained that the measures adopted in Spain in recent months have been based on two elements: an institutional environment focused on the use of data and the collaboration of social agents. “Flexibility is crucial to achieving efficient policies. Every four months, we reviewed and recalibrated measures to address the consequences of the pandemic, adjusting them to a changing environment,” he said. An experience that, according to the minister, has served to make permanent structural reforms in the labour market to strengthen innovation, training and the quality of employment.

In this sense, Escrivá has presented the first results of the labor reform: “The very positive experience of the ERTE has led us to make the internal flexibility mechanisms the key part of the labour market reform, which in its first five months of operation has yielded very favorable results in terms of job creation and reduced temporality.”

In addition to participating in the multilateral meetings, José Luis Escrivá has held bilateral meetings with German Labour Ministers Hubertus Heil; and Italy, Andrea Orlando, and this afternoon he will do so with the deputy assistant secretary of the US Department of Labor, Thea Lee. Both the summit and the bilateral meetings have also addressed the responses that are being given to a macroeconomic situation caused by the war in Ukraine in order to “protect our labour markets and, in particular, the most vulnerable segments of society,” Escrivá stressed.