INSAFORP tripartite training institute, and its dissolution
El Salvador ran its national vocational training system from 1993 through INSAFORP, an institute funded by a 1% employer payroll levy and governed by a tripartite council of four government, four employer and four worker representatives; a 2021 reform gave the President the choice of the employer seats, and Decree 893 of 14 November 2023 dissolved INSAFORP and handed its functions to INCAF, whose council holds only the institute's president and four ministries.
0 seats, employer-sector seats on the governing council of the national training institute under the 2023 incaf law, 2023-11-14. 4 seats (of 12, four per sector), employer-sector seats on the insaforp consejo directivo under the 1993 ley de formaciรณn profesional (peak structure, as read from the recital of the 2021 reform), 2021-06-03. Legislative Assembly of El Salvador, Decreto N.ยฐ 893 (Ley del Instituto Nacional de Capacitaciรณn y Formaciรณn), as published by the Supreme Court's Centro de Documentaciรณn Judicial, retrieved 2026-10-01.
The move, and what it needed
El Salvador's Legislative Assembly, on the executive's initiative, first moved the choice of INSAFORP's employer representatives to the President (2021) and then dissolved the tripartite institute, replacing it with a ministry-run council while keeping the employer payroll levy (2023). The state kept the money flow from firms and removed the firms' and workers' seats at the table.
Preconditions
- A training system financed by an employer payroll levy, so the state can keep the revenue while changing who governs it
- A legislative majority aligned with the executive, able to pass an institutional replacement in a single session
- Employer and worker organisations whose seats rested on ordinary statute rather than on constitutional or treaty protection
Where else it has been used: Levy-funded tripartite training bodies of the SENAI and INFOTEP family exist across Latin America; the Salvadoran case shows the arrangement is only as durable as the statute that seats the private sector, since the levy alone does not guarantee a voice.
Limits: The metric is a count of seats read off the text of two laws, not a measured outcome: the value 0 is our reading of Art. 11 of Decree 893, which lists only the INCAF president and four ministries, and the peak of four employer seats comes from a recital in the 2021 reform, not from the 1993 law itself, which we did not open. The 1% levy rate in the claim is read from Art. 19 of Decree 893, which carries the levy over, and was not read from the 1993 text. Neither text shows how much the employer and worker seats shaped training decisions in practice, how many people INSAFORP trained, or whether training volume or quality fell under INCAF; no official participant series was retrieved, so this record documents the end of a governance arrangement, not a fall in delivery. Firms still fund the system: Art. 19 keeps the 1% employer payroll levy, although it reserves only 20% of it for INCAF's training and sends the remaining 80% elsewhere, so the levy-funded collaboration was reshaped rather than abolished in money terms. The collaboration was already eroded before dissolution: the 2021 reform let the President pick employer representatives from ternas built by the Labour Ministry, without requiring membership of employer associations. The Supreme Court documentation host returned intermittent HTTP 522 errors on the day of retrieval before serving both documents.