One million workers do 6.4 million overtime hours each week, according to official figures from the Active Population Survey (EPA). This represents 5.1% of all salaried employees, but of these workers, almost half (an average of 436,000 people in the last year) perform 2.54 million unpaid and uncompensated overtime hours weekly. If translated into jobs, this would be equivalent to 68,000 full-time positions, according to estimates provided this Monday by the economic office of the Comisiones Obreras union.
Thus, the percentage of overtime hours that remain uncompensated stays anchored at 40% of the total of this type of hours, so they continue to be, according to CC OO’s complaint, “one of the main forms of labor abuse” in Spain, despite the legal obligation to record working hours. Precisely, one of the novelties of the reinforced time tracking that the Government has not yet definitively approved, and which has led unions to suspend other negotiations until the new regulation comes to light, is the obligation to specify the overtime hours each worker does and how they are compensated, to facilitate the Labor Inspectorate’s work when evaluating employers’ obligations and sanctioning them if they do not adequately compensate this working time.
CC OO has insisted that this practice represents a very significant detriment to workers because the unpaid overtime hours amount to 3.378 billion euros annually in wages, social contributions, and taxes that workers do not receive and employers save. On average, each affected person works 5.8 unpaid overtime hours per week, which is equivalent to losing 148 euros weekly or 7,696 euros annually in wages and contributions that they do not receive.
The education sector continues to have the highest volume of uncompensated overtime hours (accounting for 20% of the total of this type of hours), followed by manufacturing industry (9.9% of the total), professional, scientific and technical activities (9.8%), hospitality (8.9%), commerce (8.5%), and public administration (6.9%). In relative terms, the highest percentages of people performing unpaid overtime come, in this order, from financial and insurance activities, education, and publishing and content production activities.
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