Absenteeism returns
BarcelonaWith the end of the summer holidays and the arrival of autumn, the debate on workplace absenteeism will return. One of the highlights will be the white paper that at the end of this month (it could be the 28th or the 29th) Foment del Treball plans to present, and which is being prepared by a group of experts. The group is headed by Jordi García Viña, who is a professor of labor law, as coordinator and president; and the rest are Fernando Casado, who is the president of Asepeyo; Pedro Pablo Sanz, who is the director general of the association of mutual insurance companies, Amat; Daniel Torró, CEO of Geseme, dedicated to occupational risk prevention; Antonio Salas, who is a great specialist from Madrid, within Amat; the lawyer Manel Silva and Yesika Aguilar, who is the director of labor resources at Foment.
A precise and non-demagogic definition regarding unjustified absence from the workplace will be key. There are those who dare to mix everything up and play with a supposed lack of a culture of effort, as the president of the CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, or some other business leader has done on occasion. Or as the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, did, who proposed lowering the salary of those on sick leave, which, by the way, is something that already happens, and after causing controversy, some saw in it the existence of some kind of hidden labor agenda on the part of the candidate to enter Moncloa.
In any case, before, or at the same time, perhaps one of the great dysfunctions of the labor market should be solved: the excess of overtime. And what is worse, the weight of all those that are worked and that do not receive any kind of compensation, neither salary nor through time off or other benefits. In Catalonia, employees work around 40% of overtime without any kind of compensation, and on a national scale the proportion is similar, according to data from the INE, Idescat and CCOO.
It is not just money that companies save, but jobs that are not created, even though the pressure to work more hours than required shows that it should be done. According to the same sources, all this means that in Catalonia up to 12,000 full-time jobs are not created per year, about 18,000 in Madrid and an average of almost 70,000 on a national scale. This is, without a doubt, an element that should be included in the debate to improve the labor market.