Absenteeism in Galicia: 77,500 employees are absent from work every day

Just before employers and unions reached an agreement on wages for the next three years, the president of Galician employers, Juan Manuel Vieites, focused on one of the issues that most worries companies:work absenteeism. That is why he called on the central government to take measures to reduce the phenomenon that continues to grow and threatens the competitiveness of companies.

How bad is it? According to the latest quarterly report of Randstad Researchevery day around 77,500 Galicians miss work, 16,500 of them without justifiable reason. The rest have sick leave, which, as Galician employers point out, can be unnecessarily prolonged due to the lack of funds in the social insurance to manage processes in a more agile way.

Galicia is, next to the Canary Islands, the second autonomous community with the highest rate of absenteeism from work (7%), and it was surpassed only by Empty Land (7.9%). Madrid has the lowest rate (5.1%).

What is happening in the rest of the country? In Spain, 1,243,000 professionals miss work every day. Of all of them, 297,617 did so without any reason and without justifying their absence. The others reported sick leave due to temporary incapacity.

This translates into unexpected losses for companies: “Absenteeism means that 6.1% of the total agreed hours are lost in our country, which is an increase of five tenths compared to the last three months,” experts explain in the report. And this forces companies to give up part of the production or to cover these drops, which entails additional costs.

The industry is leading the way

By sector, industry in Spain has the highest absenteeism rates (6.3%), followed by the service sector (6.2%). A lower incidence was registered in construction (4.7%).

By activities, betting shops (10.6%), postal services (9.8%), housing assistance (9.6%), construction and landscaping services (9.5%) and health activities (9.4%) they record higher rates of absenteeism from work. On the contrary, those relating to employment (2.4%), computer science (3%), accounting (3%), real estate (3.1%) and publishing (3.1%) are those that record the least absences.