You return to work after six months offbut no one asks you how you are, if you can do the same as before or if something in your position should change because there is no direct connection between those who look after your health and who manages your work. A new proposal from the Ministry of Labor advocates including some improvements in the Occupational Risk Prevention Law to improve the health of workers, and update a standard that has been in force for more than thirty years.
He preliminary draft reform of the Occupational Risk Prevention Law has been opened for public consultation and includes the agreements reached between the Government and unions after almost twenty months of negotiations, although it does not have the support of the employers’ association, which ended up leaving the table. The context of this reform is to reduce accidents and with more prevention. In 2024 alone, 796 people died in work accidents in Spaincompared to the 1,356 people who did so in 1995.
Medical recognition from day one. The most notable change contemplated in the Ministry of Labor proposal is found in its article 22, which establishes regulations for the medical examinations that workers undergo. Currently, companies do not have a general obligation to do them, and they are only carried out on the recommendation of labor mutual societies. In practice, many employees go years without going through one. Under the new law, the company will have to offer a health exam when someone starts working at the company, periodically while they are at the company, and also when they return after a long absencegenerally from six months onwards.
What changes in the proposal is not only the fact that medical examination exists, but the purpose of it. The prevention doctor will no longer limit himself to saying whether or not the worker is fit to perform a certain function, but will also be able to recommend changes and adaptations to the workplace if the person needs it. And the company will be obliged to take this into account and establish a reinstatement protocol when someone returns from a long leave, including updated training if necessary.
Voluntary, but with important exceptions. Just because the company has to offer recognition does not mean that the worker is forced to do so. The general rule remains that each person decides, as is currently the case, and refusing should not have any employment consequences. But there are three situations in which the company can require it without the employee being able to refuse it: when it is essential to know if the working conditions are affecting their health, when there is a real and demonstrable risk for themselves or their colleagues, or when a specific rule imposes it because it is a particularly dangerous job.
In any case, what the doctor discovers in these tests will remain confidential. The company will only receive the conclusions that are relevant to adapt the position, not the worker’s complete medical history.
New risks enter the equation. Another of the great novelties of the proposed draft is that the law explicitly recognizes for the first time in its article 4 the emotional risksbehavioral or social, placing special emphasis in its article 16 on attention to the surveillance and prevention of psychosocial risks and derived from climate changein clear reference to the protection of workers against heat waves or the DANA. The reform now requires us to identify, evaluate and plan them concrete measures to reduce them.
The law also defines workplace harassment for the first time, and goes beyond what we usually imagine: it includes behaviors that occur only once if they are serious enough, and also those that are carried out through algorithms or artificial intelligence, something especially relevant. on digital platforms where the “boss” is an automated system that assigns the workload.
SMEs and the million-dollar question: when? In Spain there are around 1.1 million companies with ten workers or lesswhich employ three million people. They are the ones that have the most difficulty complying with occupational risk regulations, and the law takes this into account. To provide coverage, a new figure is created: territorial prevention agents. They will be people designated in each autonomous community by the unions and employers of the sector, and their job will be to visit these small companies, detect risks and, if they are not corrected, give part to the Labor Inspection. It also opens the door for mandatory risk prevention training to be subsidized for these companies.
The text presented is only a working draft that must be debated in Congress and is susceptible to modifications to be approved with sufficient support from the Chamber. If they continue their ordinary course, most of the measures would begin to apply on January 2, 2027, with a period of up to an additional year for some parts of the regulation, so this initial text would be far from being the definitive one.
Image | Unsplash (Vitaly Gariev)
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings