During December of the past year, Legislative Decrees No. 774 and 790 came into force, both related to labor matters, the first to the transitory provisions that protect workers with a vulnerable medical condition against COVID-19 and second to the extension of the entry into force of the Special Law for the Regulation and Installation of cribs for Employees Children.
Legislative Decree 774 entered into force on December 1st, 2020 and its effects will end within 180 calendar days after its publication, on May 29th of this year. The purpose of this decree is to protect workers with vulnerable medical conditions and thus prevent them from being contagious during the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to guaranteeing their job stability and salary.
Among the employees with a vulnerable medical condition are people over 60 years of age with chronic pathology, women in a high-risk state of pregnancy, people with chronic degenerative diseases, people with kidney failure, transplanted people, systematic arterial and complicated pulmonary hypertension, among some of those mentioned in Art. 3 of the Decree.
All people included within Art. 3 must present issued by the ISSS, since the private sector employees must receive the corresponding subsidy from the ISSS, according to the disability presented. It is worth mentioning that the respective guidelines issued by the ISSS for the application of Legislative Decree 774 are already in place. These guidelines explain the mechanisms for the issuance of employees’ disabilities.
The second Legislative Decree mentioned is Decree No. 790, which entered into force on December 16th, 2020, and which comes from the request of the Minister of Labor of December 9th, in which he requests the Legislative Assembly reform the Special Law for the Regulation and Installation of Nurseries for the Employees Children, in relation to its entry into force.
The aforementioned Special Law should have come into force on January 1st, 2021, however, due to the biosafety measures adopted by most countries regarding the suspension of activities in educational and child development centers, coupled with the economic impact from the COVID-19 pandemic, the entry into force of this Law is extended until January 1st, 2022. It should be noted that currently there is no Regulation of the Law.
Both decrees are a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic that continues causing economic and labor impacts in most of the world’s productive sectors.
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El Salvador