The debate on working time is not new in this legislature by any means. The first Minister of Labor of Pedro Sánchez, Magdalena Valerio, has already carried out the controversial law that forced all companies to record the hours of their workers daily in order to control the performance of overtime, and her successor and current second vice president of the Executive , Yolanda Díaz began the development of a law on the use of time, while the Government also approved a pilot project on a four-day week in the last legislature. Along with this, Díaz herself has always shown off the reinforcement of the sanctioning arm of the labor market: the Labor Inspection, which during the last legislature intensified its activity on several fronts. One of them was working time and overtime, where last year the actions of these inspectors increased again, the infractions detected and the sanctions imposed on non-compliant companies.
Specifically, the Labor Inspection – which reports to Yolanda Díaz – last year increased its number of actions regarding working time and overtime by almost 9% compared to 2022, exceeding 35,500 interventions in 2023, according to provisional figures. to which this newspaper has accessed. However, the use of artificial intelligence and specifically the so-called MAX algorithm, among other things, has served to optimize these actions, and concentrate inspection actions in companies where time abuse is already suspected, Labor sources explain.
This has allowed a substantial increase in the number of infractions detected, which increased by 45% last year to 14,292. The inspectors imposed sanctions for these offenses worth just over 15 million euros on the offending companies, to which they also issued 9,226 requirements, almost 12% more than the previous year. The number of workers affected by non-compliance regarding working time and overtime has also increased substantially, by 31%, from 112,884 in 2022 to 147,861 in 2023.
Thus, although the debate and the Government's focus on working time goes back a long way, it has been now that the unions and employers have gotten down to work to try to negotiate how to cut the current maximum working day from 40 hours per week to 38.5 hours in 2024 and 37.5 hours next year, as agreed by the PSOE and Sumar in their coalition government agreement. This negotiation, closely followed by the Ministry of Labor, addresses not only the reduction in working hours but other issues related to working time, which will even be key to paving the way for a possible agreement, as all negotiators agree.
Precisely, among these issues that employers and unions have put on the table is the regulation of overtime. In Spain, overtime hours can be added to the ordinary working day – 40 hours of effective work per week on average on an annual basis – as long as they do not exceed a maximum of 80 per year. However, overtime hours that are compensated for work time instead of being compensated with money do not count towards reaching this limit. The Workers' Statute stipulates that “by means of a collective agreement or, failing that, an individual contract, a choice will be made between paying overtime hours in the amount established, which in no case may be less than the value of the ordinary hour, or compensating them. for equivalent periods of paid rest.” In the last quarter of 2023, 6.34 million overtime hours per week were performed in Spain, of which 39% were not paid, according to data from the Active Population Survey (EPA). That said, this same statistic indicates that only 5% of employees regularly work overtime and only 2.6% did paid overtime.
The payment of these overtime hours is one of the issues that have been included in the negotiations on the reduction of working hours, as indicated by the union representatives after the last tripartite meeting they had with the Ministry of Labor. And, specifically, the possibility of paying more – as advised by the European Social Charter – would be one of the options defended by the unions. This demand has already been launched, before even beginning to negotiate the reduction in working hours, by the UGT union, which last January presented a claim to the European Committee of Social Rights for overtime to be paid 25% more than the ordinary ones, since the current law only provides that they be paid at least the same as the latter.
This is how extras are paid in Europe
It would try to emulate what already exists in other European countries since, according to the data collected by this center, a good number of EU States pay up to 50% more for overtime than ordinary hours. This is the case of Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Malta. This increase is 40% over the ordinary ones in Greece, Luxembourg and Norway; 30% in Slovenia; 25% in the Czech Republic, Portugal and Slovakia; and 10% in France.
While in other European countries the norm does not determine how much must be paid for hours that exceed the maximum legal working day, but they refer their payment and consideration to collective bargaining. This is the case of States such as Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy and Croatia.
In Spain, overtime is regulated in article 35 of the Workers' Statute. The text points out that these hours are all those that exceed the hours agreed upon in labor contracts or collective labor agreements, always with the maximum limit of 40 hours per week on an annual basis. Furthermore, according to Spanish legislation, you can choose between “paying overtime in the amount established, which in no case may be less than the value of the ordinary hour, or compensating it for equivalent paid rest periods.”
In this scenario, a higher payment for overtime could have as compensation in the negotiation of the working day, the elimination of the aforementioned limit of 80 overtime hours per year that is currently included in Spanish law. These pieces of the puzzle must also be squared with the announcement by those responsible for the Ministry of Labor – backed by the unions – to eliminate the possibility that companies can record the daily working hours of their workers on paper and force them to use digital means with two purposes: to avoid manipulation and allow the Inspection remote and real-time access to all of the country's time records. Furthermore, the intention of Yolanda Díaz's team is also to toughen the sanctioning system regarding working hours, so that the fine is issued for each worker involved in excessive hours and not for each offending company, which would multiply the amount of the sanctions.
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