Labor aspects of the Basis Law are regulated

By means of Decree 847, published in the Official Gazette on September 26, 2024, the Executive has regulated the Law of Bases and Starting Points for the Freedom of the Argentine People 27742 regarding the labor and social security matters. The Bases Law had introduced very important amendments to the labor legislation and some of those amendments needed this regulation to enter into force.

 

These are the most relevant aspects of the regulation:

 

Regularization of existing employment relationships

 

The Decree regulates the plan for regularizing labor relations, establishing the terms and conditions for adherence and its social security benefits.

 

In particular, aligned with the Bases Law, the Decree allows employers to register unregistered or deficiently registered labor relationships with a series of benefits:

 

1. extinction of the criminal action,
2. removal of the employer from the Public Registry of Employers with Labor Sanctions (REPSAL),
3. debt forgiveness of principal and interest.

 

The percentage of debt forgiveness depends on the type of company, and ranges from 70% to 90% of the total principal and interest. It applies to social security and labor risk insurance, in these cases with a remission of 100%. This regularization plan does not include the regimes of private housekeepers and agricultural personnel.

 

The regularization plan is an interesting instrument to analyze to regularize social security debts.

 

Severance fund

 

The Decree establishes alternatives to paying certain labor severance. Although the details of each option have yet to be defined, these are innovative solutions that will require a case-by-case analysis to assess its suitability.

 

Self-employed workers with collaborators

 

The Bases Law created a new regime as an option to hire self-employed workers. The Decree lists the requirements that self-employed workers and their collaborators must meet, and the characteristics that the relationships between them must have for this new contracting regime to be valid. These aspects will need be analyzed when assessing the possibility and convenience of implementing this contracting regime or when subcontracting services from third parties who have implemented this new regime.

 

Clarifications

 

The regulatory decree introduces some clarifications on the amendments the Bases Law made

 

1. requirements to exclude service providers from the presumption of existence of an employment contract,
2. the date from which the extended probationary period applies,
3. the amounts over which a company may withhold sums owed to its contractors and intermediaries for the social security debts these last have. 

 

Although there are aspects pending regulation, the Decree entered into force on September 26, 2024.