The Chilean Government has just announced a project to improve the coverage and deadlines of the Employment Protection Law. Despite the fact that people with disabilities are the largest group in a vulnerable situation in our country, they were not considered in the initial text or in the new amendments.
According to the last National Disability Study of 2015, more than 2,800,000 people have disabilities, that is, 20% of Chileans. Of these, 50% belong to the two poorest quintiles of the population and in 1 out of 5 households there is a member with a disability.
To date, more than 35 thousand people have not been able to take advantage of the Employment Protection Law, due to not having a current relationship with the Unemployment Fund Administrator (AFC), according to the latest report from the Superintendency of Pensions. The Employment Protection Law did not consider that certain groups of the population – such as people with disabilities who have a total invalidity pension and pensioners of any regime – do not have unemployment insurance, so they were not incorporated as beneficiaries of the extraordinary measures of the Employment Protection Law.
