About technical criteria of the Labour Inspection and Social Security

Abstract

In Spain, the Labour Inspection and Social Security system is established as a public service with the competence of surveying, promoting and ensuring the fulfilment of the social-labour normative.

The current Law 42/1997 of 14th November, regulating the Labour Inspection and Social Security system, defines an integral Inspection System of a global character that is founded in both the Spanish State and the Autonomous Communities, depending on their respective competences and under the principle of interinstitutional collaboration.

From this perspective, in the performance of its duties, the Labour Inspection must apply a very wide normative, which is not exempt of difficulties in its interpretation, existing therefore an associated margin of administrative discretion.

Since 1997, the Central Authority of the Labour Inspection and Social Security system elaborates a series of numbered technical and operative criteria, with the aim of guiding the inspection activities in order to unify the criteria of the civil servants, independently of his territorial area of action and of his organic dependency.

The study performs a jurisprudential and doctrinal analysis around the juridical nature of these criteria and reconsiders over his binding characteristic and over the competency area for his elaboration, expressing the need of approaching the competent authorities for those actions affecting matters which execution has been transferred to the Autonomous Communities.

It contains likewise aspects related to the evolution of its elaboration process and in the discrimination between the criteria, depending on which its content is of technical or operative characteristic, rating positively the recent advertisement of them as a necessary requirement in order that they could reach normative range.

These questions acquire special interest in a moment characterized by the recent transfer of part of the civil servants of the Inspection System to the Catalonian Autonomous Community (Generalitat), and to further transfers to other Autonomous Communities in progress.

Subsequently, the Technical Criteria is constituted as a basic pillar for the maintenance of a single Inspection System, integral and integrated, contributing to the uniform treatment of the law, granting juridical security in benefit of the diverse subjects of the individual and collective working relations.