Absenteeism: fooling the appetite

The other day, during a conference in Almeria, the managers of a cooperative explained to me that they needed to have a workforce approximately 20% larger than what their activity required. They had around 1,500 workers and every day between 200 and 300 people were absent. To ensure normal operation, they had to maintain hundreds of additional workers.

And in this case we are not even talking about the profits of a large multinational. We are talking about a cooperative. The money that is lost belongs, ultimately, to the cooperativists themselves.

It is necessary to distinguish concepts. Workplace absenteeism includes the hours during which a person does not occupy their position when they were scheduled to work, regardless of whether the absence is justified or not. A medical leave, on the other hand, is a medically certified temporary disability. Therefore, medical leaves are part of absenteeism, but absenteeism does not necessarily mean fraud.

How much fraud is there? During the second quarter of 2026, 7.2% of contracted hours were lost due to absenteeism; 5.6% corresponded to medical leave. In other words, 22% of absenteeism in Spain is not accounted for by medical leave.

I am nobody to judge whether a person who does not go to work has a justified reason. Most absences are due to real problems and it would be profoundly unfair to turn all sick workers into suspects. The innocent would pay for the guilty. But we also cannot deny that the way we are managing absenteeism imposes increasingly high structural costs on many companies.

Someone might think that absenteeism creates jobs: if so many workers are absent, more are hired who, otherwise, would not have been hired. Yes, it could be seen that way. But the reality is not that simple. Hiring three hundred people to cover the habitual absence of three hundred people is a loss of competitiveness that, in the long run, ends up destroying employment.

In any sector there are margins, labor costs and reinvestment needs that determine the viability of companies. If producing the same thing requires a 20% larger structure, there is less profit left to innovate, invest and resist against competitors with lower costs. In the long run, companies with a structural overload enter into crisis and end up disappearing.

The absenteeism rate has practically doubled since the lows of 2013. No economy can afford to turn structural absence into a habitual form of work organization.

More absenteeism, more workers. But this only serves to whet the appetite.