Understanding Discrimination and Labor Rights in Spain

Understanding Discrimination

Positive Discrimination: Protection of extraordinary character, which is given to a group historically discriminated against on grounds of sex, race, religion, or language to achieve their full social integration.

Negative Discrimination: Giving inferior treatment to a person or group on racial, religious, political, etc. grounds.

Indirect Discrimination: Launching formally neutral conditions regarding sex but disadvantageous to women, lacking a sufficient cause that is objective, reasonable, and justified.

Infodona aims to provide advisory services to women, women's groups, and other entities, to facilitate their participation, on equal opportunities and conditions, in all areas that give content to the Valencian society today.

Family Models

• Traditional Family: Based on sexual division of labor.
• Semi-Traditional Family: Obliges women to a double shift (work and domestic work).
• Symmetrical Family: A new minority model, based on equal roles.

Androcentrism

Androcentrism: A vision of the world in male terms; a reconstruction of the universe from a male perspective. The heart of it is the male. Women are objects rather than subjects: one acts on them, women do not act. The male is the reference. The problems and experiences of women are becoming common.

Positive Action

Positive Action: All those actions to overcome both the negative effects of the market, such as social attitudes and existing ways of women, in order to place them in a real situation of equal starting conditions.

Labor Unions in Spain

• UGT: Unión General de Trabajadores (Socialist), founded in 1888.
• CCOO: Comisiones Obreras, created in the 1950s.
• USO: Unión Sindical Obrera, founded in 1960.
• CSIF: Confederación de Sindicatos Independientes de Funcionarios.
• CGT: Confédération Générale du Travail, founded in 1911. Anarchist trend.

Labor Rights

Collective Bargaining Agreement: The written result of the collective bargaining process; it is a source of law.

Staff Delegates: They are the elected representatives in companies having more than 10 employees and fewer than 50.

Works Council: Collective representation of workers in firms of more than 50 workers.

Union Sections: They have the privilege of choosing a head of section in companies of more than 250 employees and will have some guarantees and rights of the committee.