The Plenary of Congress has struck down this Thursday most of the PP's amendments introduced in the Senate to the draft Comprehensive Law for the Promotion of the Social Economy, so that the text is definitively ratified in the same terms in which it initially left the Lower House before being sent to the Upper House.
The regulation seeks to update and strengthen the legal framework of this area and, to that end, aims to curb intrusion in cooperatives, specifying which entities are truly integrated into the Social Economy, as stated by the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy.
The Law is structured into four articles that retouch the main norms that make up the legal framework of the sector: the Cooperatives Law, the Law for the Regulation of the Regime of Insertion Companies, the Social Economy Law and the Law on the Tax Regime of Cooperatives, according to information from Labor.
The department led by Yolanda Díaz highlights that the new regulation will serve to reinforce and promote innovative Social Economy formulas, among them cooperative housing under a right of use scheme, energy communities and fair trade.
In the field of housing in assignment of use, the text modifies the Law of Fiscal Regime of Cooperatives to recognize for the first time as specially protected certain housing cooperatives, in particular those of assignment of use, provided that they maintain ownership of the properties, do not distribute returns and comply with specific conditions.
The regulation also seeks to adapt and update the Cooperatives Law, incorporating the development of equality plans within these entities and the creation of an Equality Commission that promotes conciliation and guarantees the principle of balanced presence of women and men in the social bodies.
Labor also highlights the reinforcement of the causes for administrative disqualification, in order to act against organizations that operate under a false cooperative appearance and violate their principles and values. With this, the aim is to safeguard cooperative identity against “instrumental or fraudulent uses, and combat intrusion in cooperatives by clarifying which companies are part of the Social Economy and which are not”.
Likewise, the second article of the law modifies the Law for the regulation of the Regime of Insertion Companies, entities aimed at facilitating access to the labor market for people in vulnerable situations, incorporating a definition of insertion company “more adequate and coherent with its purposes”, according to the Ministry.
In this regard, Labor highlights that the changes introduced in its internal organization will help ensure its competitiveness, setting indefinite hiring in ordinary companies as the horizon. “The law better organizes insertion itineraries and adapts them to the logic of indefinite hiring after the labor reform,” the department points out.
The third article amends the Social Economy Law to specify the different typologies and the catalog of entities that make up this scope. It also redefines the objectives that public policies must assume in the promotion of the sector and expands reserved public procurement, increasing the percentage of public sector tenders destined for insertion companies and special employment centers of social initiative.
The Social Economy, a key part of GDP
During the parliamentary debate, the second vice-president of the Government and Minister of Labor and Social Economy, has thanked the support of the groups that “have understood the importance of the Social Economy” and have allowed this law to go forward, after “a year and a half” of work to bring about an “important law, which perhaps does not make as much noise as others, but which says a lot about the country that one wants to build”.
Díaz has stressed that the norm has been conceived “listening to the cooperatives, to the insertion companies, to the special employment centers of social initiative and to so many entities that have been demonstrating for years that another way of doing economy is not only possible, but necessary”.
In his speech, he defended that the Social Economy “is not a minor corner of our productive system, but a decisive part of the Spanish economy; a model that puts people, decent work, territorial roots, and the general interest at the center”.
According to Labor data, cooperatives, insertion companies, special employment centers of social initiative, brotherhoods, mutual societies, non-profit foundations and the rest of the entities that integrate the Social Economy in Spain generated a turnover equivalent to 11.1% of GDP in each of the years of the 2019-2023 period.
The productive fabric of the Spanish Social Economy is made up of 127,532 companies and entities, on which depend 2,250,389 direct and indirect jobs, with a combined turnover of 169,691 million euros, according to the latest sector data published by the National Institute of Statistics (INE).