The number of overtime hours worked and unpaid in Spain continues to rise and in the second quarter was at levels of lockdown of 2020, when a large part of the population went to work from home and the border between the office and private life was blurred. This is confirmed by the latest data from the active population survey (EPA), which show that the 49% of overtime hours are not paid in Spain. It is the highest level since the second quarter of 2020 and, ignoring the covid period, the highest percentage in the last five years, according to INE records. Saying labor fraud affects half a million employees throughout the country, it harms women to a greater extent than men and, to stop it, the fact that the Ministry of Labor is deploying a specifically designed algorithm of which the inspectors consulted are still unaware.
13 million hours they are worked monthly in Spain and the companies do not pay them. It is the highest figure since the second quarter of 2020, when the first state of alarm multiplied the lengthening of the working day not agreed upon due to the difficulties in reconciling professional and family life for many workers, who quickly and quickly turned the dining room table into a work desk.
According to a survey carried out by the consultancy Haysthe 61% of the employees who teleworked then worked overtime on a recurring basis and were neither charged nor compensated with holidays. Now, with a lower percentage of remote work, overtime and unpaid hours are picking up strongly. Lengthening of the working day and record number of job vacancies, on the one hand, while Spain, with 2.8 million unemployed, continues to have the highest rate in the European Union.
The fraud of unpaid extensions of the working day is a constant in the labor market governed by the accordion principle. It contracts during times of lower economic activity and picks up when GDP is rising. It is not for nothing that the quarters with the highest number of overtime hours are concentrated in the periods prior to the bursting of the double real estate and financial bubble or at the beginning of the recovery after the great recession. The record for unpaid overtime hours is registered in the second quarter of 2008, when the 15.7 million hours a month.
“What this rebound in overtime and unpaid overtime shows is that informality is increasing. There are employers who, faced with the uncertainty of what will happen in the coming months, prefer to force their workers to extend the working day than hire In the second semester, when activity is expected to drop, overtime will drop again”, affirms the labor secretary of the CCOO of Catalonia, Ricard Bellera. “It shows the inability of many employers to understand that other work models are possible and they throw away the opportunity,” she adds.
The day record does not give the time
And despite the fact that recent governments have tried to put an end to this bad business practice – which saves managers’ salaries and widens the gaps between men and women -, for the moment they have not managed to residualize it. In 2019 the first Executive of Pedro Sanchezcon Magdalena Valerio at the head of the Ministry of Labor, approved the obligation to register the working day. Since then, companies must legally keep track of the hours that their employees perform and thus avoid unpaid overtime.
Three years after the rule came into force, half of the companies do not pass an inspection and the proportion of unpaid days is still linked to economic cycles. And, according to the study carried out by the human resources company Kenjo, three out of 10 companies in Spain do not have a time record despite it being mandatory.
“The record of working hours is a useful tool, it helps us inspectors to prosecute fraud in overtime”, affirms the president of the Union of Labor Inspectors (SITSS), Ana Ercoreca. That regulation, added to the increasing technological dependence of many jobs, are new tools in favor of inspectors. “If a person works using a computer, we can check if it is operational during non-working hours through the VPN connection”, explains Ercoreca.
However, he recognizes that it is not enough to avoid that half of the overtime hours are not paid, because although now when there is an inspection it is easier to detect fraud, the problem is the lack of hands to carry out those inspections. According to the body’s report for 2020, in Spain there are 2,005 officers, including inspectors and sub-inspectors, to monitor the conditions of more than 20 million workers, that is, 1 inspector for every 10,000 workers.
gender gap
The new attempt by the current government and the second vice president, Yolanda Diaz, is to reinforce the Labor Inspection to control it. The chosen tool consists of an algorithm specifically created to help inspectors track and detect before going to the workplace if there are signs that hours are being worked there and not being paid.
This algorithm -baptized as MAX (More algorithms for less overtime) – was announced in early June and the latest data from the EPA does not allow us to measure whether or not it is working. For this, we will have to wait for the EPA of the third quarter, which will measure the first three months in force of the algorithm. At the moment, from the SITSS they say they have not received any instructions on how MAX works to date.
The proportion of overtime worked but not paid does not have the same incidence between men and women. A total of 880,500 employees throughout Spain perform overtime on a recurring basis. Among these, some 453,000 work but are not paid, and this is more common among female workers. If among them the total of unpaid overtime hours represents 45.1% of the overtime hours worked, among them said percentage rises 10 points, to 55.7%. This is explained, in part, by the frequency of this practice among certain professions, such as, for example, scientific activities o to education, where more than 70% of overtime hours are not paid and between the two unions they account for almost a third of the total unpaid overtime hours.