Notas para una gramática elemental del nuevo régimen de la duración del contrato de trabajo en España

Resumen

The labor contracting system, and specifically the rules that order the articulation between temporary and indefinite contracts —the duration of the employment relationship—, has been substantially modified in Spain after the 2021-22 labor reform. Not really through a paradigm shift, since the regulations of the permanent contract and the principle of causality of temporary contracts undoubtedly continue to be the fundamental rule, although through a new way of understanding these premises that is much stricter and less tolerant of the flexible use of temporary contracts. It could consequently be said that the labor reform has come with a change in the model in the regime of the duration of the employment contract, a change that due to the complexity of the matter and the novelty of many of the rules introduced has raised doubts and uncertainties that call for reflection. Obviously, the labor doctrine authors has given a full response to this call for reflection, and the studies that have been taking charge of the issue in recent times are already very abundant and solvent. Therefore, this work intends to simply propose a basic and very general synthesis of the main terms of the new legal framework of the duration of the employment contract in Spain, always within a double objective of explanatory parsimony (seeking to reduce and simplify the elements of the applied heuristic) and interpretive criticism (seeking to reveal the true scope of the new rules). Thus, always from a functional or economic analysis approach to law, it is intended above all to offer a systematic-critical re-exposition of the new rules on temporary and indefinite contracts, ordering its content around the classic semiotic distinction —pertinent in law analysis— of three separate axes, namely, the semantic (axis of terms), the syntactic (axis of links) and the pragmatic one (axis of operations).