These are bad times for poetry in the music business building. A los problems de falta de mano de obra que arrastra desde hace años y el más reciente que le está suponiendo la subida exponencial del precio de las primas materia se suma poco a poco otro de carácter técnico pero de gran calado en su actividad: el de the ranking of contractorswhich is beginning to affect even the largest companies in the world without the Ministry of Finance having removed, for the moment, the bureaucratic obstacles and the anachronistic requirements which are the cause.
In order to carry out work, construction companies must obtain some kind of card or classification that the Treasury grants them for each type of project after evaluating both their technical or professional solvency and their economic and financial solvency. This classification determines the type of work and the economic amount of work that can be performed and the problem, depending on the sector, is that the criteria for determining it have become totally obsolete. The current classification standard comes from a Ministerial Order of 1968, which, with slight formal touches, has survived to this day. At that time, as they explain from construction, companies tended to be intensive in the use of labor and in their own machine park, so at that time having sufficient resources of the two types was a reasonable condition for obtaining the mentioned classification.
The problem, they say of the sector, is that the company has evolved a lot over the last fifty years with new ways of working and hiring, with specialization and subcontracting. Thus, companies, especially smaller ones, have specialized in carrying out one-off jobs which, in most cases, are part of a larger contract coordinated by a larger company. Or the machine parks are owned by companies with great professionalism in the execution of complex specialized parts of the work and the scrupulous maintenance of the equipment. And in both cases, these companies do not want nor can be awarded and corresponding to a large volume contract, with actions unrelated to their activity or whose commissioning or conclusion is largely unknown.
As a graphic example, the sector explains that during the reconstruction of the T-4 car park at the Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas airport, which ETA destroyed in an attack in December 2006, more than 1,000 companies coordinated by a major firm. Subcontracting, in fact, is perfectly regulated in the law on public sector contracts and in the law regulating subcontracting in the construction sector. However, denounces the sector, “Contractor grading regulations simply ignore this reality by requiring the same requirements from each other’s businesses as well”. In other words, companies are required to have everything in themselves, personnel and machinery, in an era when it usually works through collaborations, specializations or outsourcing. And this, they warn, leads to many companies, including the largest ones, are losing their qualifications for jobs in certain categories for which they do not have these machines or jigs because, directly, they subcontract them. A) Yes, Leading companies are losing internal references, essential not only for the execution of works in Spain, but also to continue to execute the most complex in the world.
Solutions
From the administration, construction companies have been advised to resort to Temporary Unions of Companies (UTE). Instead, this option not a reasonable route for small specialist businesses because it obliges them to share the risk of the totality of a work over which they will not have control, since the responsibility would in any case be joint and several. This mechanism, explained the sector, “is valid for the collaboration of two complementary companies, but of similar size, but it does not serve to make available to the works external and specialized means but controlled by the main contractor, since they will not be taken into account as work carried out by them although having been regularly coordinated with proven success”.
For the sector, starting with its employer CNCs, the solution lies in the fact that the Ministry of Finance update the personnel and machinery needs you require now and which are directly linked to the archaic criteria of the 1968 standard. The CNC considers it appropriate to limit or even eliminate this requirement to have its own means and personnel, by favoring certified experience in the proper execution of the work, and not so much to having its own personnel and its own machines.
In addition, the sector considers it necessary double, as permitted by European regulations, up to ten years the calculation of the required experience construction companies to access public contracts compared to the current five, as the pandemic limits or delays the activity of certain types of contracts, thus limiting the number of companies that can bid. This temporary limitation harms and discriminates against many companies, especially SMEs, preventing them from accumulating experience during these five years despite proven solvency and previous experience.
Finally, employers also regret the problems that exist with the limitation of the number of work certificates that are valued as experience, the requirements for certificates of work carried out abroad, something essential for our Spain brand; and the delay or reluctance of local governments in issuing them.
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