Minister of Labor Rafael Alburquerque said that representatives of labor, business and the government will have to meet several times for the Labor Code is to be modified. Business groups have begun to pressure for changes in the Code. They say that while the Code was written to avoid company abuses against workers, today it is the companies that are being abused by laborers. Several companies have become victims of street smart lawyers that are inventing cases against engineering firms, for example, as have denounced several engineering associations. More so, lawyer Luis Rivas Hirujo, who recently has been very vocal about the business cause, says that the way the severance payment section is written up favors job instability and can lead to the bankruptcy of small companies. He wants the article that orders a company to pay double of the sentence granted a worker if they want to appeal a case to be eliminated. Rivas said that it is in the better interest of workers to modify the code because without companies there are no jobs. In the DR most companies will not go to court over a labor case, preferring to settle or meet high severance payments regardless of whether they are right or wrong.
