Second round of labor reform: business associations join in its reformulation

With the purpose of improving the text of the labor reform, the Minister of Labor, Gloria Inés Ramírez, held a working meeting with Maria Claudia Lacouture, president of the Alliance of Associations and Guilds (Aliadas), an organization that groups 37 production guilds and is made up of 7 thousand companies that are responsible for more than 5 million formal jobs.

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The purpose of the meeting between the Ministry of Labor and Aliadas was to present some details of the labor reform, exchange opinions and proposals from the business sectors in order to improve the bill. Among the main proposals to improve the text of the reform is the creation of technical round tables for the gastronomy, mining and services sectors.

The meeting with the business associations, together with other approaches advanced by the ministerial portfolio, goes hand in hand with the recent declarations of Minister Ramírez who affirmed yesterday, August 10, that in two weeks the labor reform will be filed again in the Congress of the Republic.

According to the head of the ministerial portfolio, “In more or less two weeks we will have this reform ready to be filed again in the Congress of the Republic”, assured Ramírez in the middle of the presentation of the balance of the main achievements of the national government during the first year.

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MinTrabajo advances in agreements with business, workers and agricultural productive unions.

For the president of Aliadas, the meeting with the MinTrabajo is a sign of the interest in working hand in hand between the private sector and the public sector for a better labor reform.

At the end of the meeting, Lacouture said, “We are absolutely clear that there is a need to work together, to reach consensus, to achieve between disagreements and agreements to work hand in hand between the public sector and the private sector, and that is what we have done today. We will continue working to achieve the best reform that will serve all Colombians”, said Lacouture.

For her part, the Minister of Labor was satisfied with the meeting and said, “This is a process we have to improve the construction processes we are carrying out for the labor reform. We have opened an important door, from the point of view of accepting new proposals, which will allow Colombia to advance towards being a country of rights”, said Minister Ramírez.

The meeting followed the presentation of the results of a study by Aliadas last week, which addressed employment issues such as informality and the challenges to promote labor formalization in Colombia.

In addition, the results of the study highlight the importance of incentives for education and training, savings, new modalities for labor linkage, incentives for entrepreneurship, labor stability and self-management of time, among others, said MinTrabajo through a statement.

Likewise, MinTrabajo informed that it has been holding meetings with other productive sectors. The most recent was with the three labor federations of the country, CUT, CGT, and CTC, as well as with the confederations of pensioners, with the purpose of presenting the bases of the labor reform.

Finally, he reported some progress on the approaches with agricultural unions such as the Colombian Federation of Cattle Raisers (Fedegán), the National Agricultural Union Federation (Fensuagro), as well as with representatives of the digital delivery platforms.

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