Knowledge of the labor regulation of the sector in which you work is essential for every employee, especially when it comes to knowing both their rights and obligations and those of your employer.
In this sense, the
collective agreement
is revealed as the most important legal source in the context of labor relations and collects all the necessary information to understand in depth the characteristics of each job.
In this way, in this article we explain the concept of collective agreement, which includes its classes, characteristics and content, and we indicate how to know the agreement applicable to each company.
What is a collective agreement?
The cCollective agreement is a concept that refers to an agreement signed by the representatives of workers and employers, which is established as a source of rights and obligations and fixes the conditions of work and productivity,in accordance with the regulations imposed in the Title III of the Workers’ Statute.
In this way, in the world of work, there is a large number of collective agreements; since the representatives of the workers and employers conclude continuous agreements, so it will be convenient to know which one will be applicable to each company.
What is the content of the collective agreement?
The content of the collective agreement shall deal with circumstances:
- Economic (salaries, indirect remunerations…).
- Work (working hours, breaks, duration of contracts, performance required …).
- Trade unions (staff delegates, works councils…).
Likewise, the collective agreement of a company includes the measures of professional promotion,the obligations aimed at regulating labor peace and, in any case, the scope of personal, functional, territorial and temporal application of the agreement.
In short, it can be said that the collective agreement will include and regulate all the conditions of each job.
It must respect, in any case, the mandatory rules contained in the Workers’ Statute. That is, the law will set certain limits or minimums that, if respected, will allow employers and workers’ representatives to self-regulate through these agreements.
What types of collective agreements exist?
Mainly, due to its scope of application (which, as has been seen, will be determined by the provisions of the convention itself), two types of agreements can be distinguished:
- Sectoral collective agreement:One that will be applicable to a sector of economic activity. In turn, this type of agreement may be classified according to its territorial scope. Those applicable at the local, county, regional, provincial, interprovincial, regional or statelevel can be distinguished.
- Company collective agreement:The one that will be applicable to a specific company. That is, it will be the collective agreement of a given company, so it will apply to its workers, whatever their job and the territory in which they are located.
How to locate the collective agreement corresponding to your company
Importance of knowledge of the applicable collective agreement
There are many workers who wonder “how to know the collective agreement of my company”.
The main reason is that, in this agreement, the essential conditions of each job will be established,which will always be better or at least equal to the legal limits imposed by the Workers’ Statute.
Since a given company will never be able, for example, to pay lower wages, impose shorter holidays or require a longer working day than that established in the applicable collective agreement, it is very convenient for each worker to know his respective agreement.
In this way, with the knowledge of your rights, you can count on the possibility of defending them, if they were attacked at any time.
How do you know what is the collective agreement that applies to each job?
When locating a collective agreement,you are advised to go to the list of collective labor agreements.
Thus, although you can start your search in the most intuitive way, that is, through the Google search engine, if you want to carry out a more precise location, it will be convenient to go to the search engine created by the Ministry of Employment and Social Security itself.
This search engine is that of the
National Advisory Commission on Collective Agreements,
which will allow you to carry out a search, either by Autonomous Communities or through the code and / or text of the agreement.
conclusion
The
collective agreement
is revealed as the most important source of standards in the workplace, since it allows adapting the generic regulation (included, fundamentally, in the Workers’ Statute) to each company and job, through a negotiation held between the interested parties.
Therefore, workers and employers (both through their respective representatives) will deal, point by point, with the essential issues of each job (salary, working hours, conditions…).
Precisely, because of its importance, it will be necessary to know how to locate a certain collective agreement,since otherwise it would be difficult to defend those rights that are unknown.
