“Article 398. Collective Bargaining Agreement is any written agreement regarding working and employment conditions, concluded between an employer, a group of employers or one or more employers' organizations, on the one hand, and, on the other, one or more various unions, federations, confederations or workers' centrals. "
The following elements are derived from this definition:
• It is a written agreement, which must be signed, adds article 399, in three copies.
• It is aimed at regulating working and employment conditions.
• The employer may be subject to one or more employers or an employers' organization, which can.
• be a trade union or common law organization.
• On the part of the workers, it can only be held by a union organized group, that is, despite the fact that non-organized groups of workers can present documents of demands and exercise the right to strike, they do not have the capacity to enter into collective agreements.
Let's start by specifying that the obligation established by article 401 of the Labor Code (still in its original version before being reformed) does not refer to the obligation to sign the convention requested by the workers.
It is rather an obligation to negotiate in good faith, with the intention of reaching the result required by law.
In other words: It means that the employer could no longer say, as it did during the previous Code, that the law does not oblige it to enter into a collective agreement and that it therefore refuses to negotiate.
According to article 403 of the Labor Code, the Collective Agreement must contain:
• The names and addresses of the parties;
• The company, establishments or businesses that it comprises;
• Regulations of the Business Committee.
• Stipulations on wages;
• Duration;
• The other stipulations that agree to the parties.
A. Distinction between mandatory clauses and normative clauses: Apart from clauses that have a formal or accessory character, traditionally two types of clauses are distinguished in collective agreements.
The so-called mandatory clauses, which are those that establish direct rights and obligations between the union and the employer; and the normative clauses that are aimed at establishing general working conditions, which will serve as the basis for the content of individual contracts and which, obviously, are aimed or should be aimed at improving and not repeating current legislation.
Outside of this main classification, which sets aside other secondary distinctions, we must distinguish in the content of the collective agreement the clauses that refer to essential matter of contracting and those of an optional nature.
B. Effects of the Collective Agreement We will limit ourselves to briefly exposing the main effects that our legislation attributes to the collective agreement, a subject that really deserves a special study that on this occasion we cannot exhaustively address.