PP to help ease labor contract U-turn through Congress

Nobody in the halls of Congress has any doubt that times have changed significantly. On Wednesday, the lower house will witness an unheard-of event. The opposition Popular Party (PP), for so long a bitter rival, will help the ruling Socialists pass a key, and very unpopular, labor reform that supports temporary contracts, contradicting a limit on such employment terms that the government itself had enacted in 2006.

Under that earlier legislation, after four straight temporary contracts employers had the obligation to hire the worker on a permanent basis. Now, there will be no such limit for at least the next two years. Temporary employment has long been considered one of Spain's biggest ills, and a resource that employers abuse to avoid the expenses of permanent workers. Before the crisis hit, the government had pledged to curb the practice.

"We'd rather have a temporary worker than an unemployed one," justified Labor Minister Valeriano Gómez in August, when the Cabinet passed the decree that is about to be greenlighted in Congress.

The main opposition party had rejected all the major laws passed since the government changed tack on its economic policies. However, earlier this month it joined hands with the Socialists to push an unpopular reform of the Constitution to include a cap on the budget deficit through Congress.

"It is a bad decree because it drives us to complete precariousness," said Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, the PP speaker in Congress. Yet they will refrain from voting, a tacit form of support. "Out of responsibility and a sense of state we are going to abstain," she said.