“Silence kills. And there is still a lot of silence surrounding mental health problems in many companies,” said UGT’s general secretary, Pepe Álvarez, this Wednesday at the press conference where he presented the study Situation of Temporary Incapacity and its effects on health. Suicide prevention in the workplace. In it, the union once again intervenes in one of the great labor debates of the moment, the increase in sick leave in recent years in Spain, and focuses on a less-noticed consequence: suicides related to the workplace. Álvarez has demanded that this issue be part of the negotiation with employers and also calls for legislative reforms to mitigate it.
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“For some time now, there have been cases where, despite no recognition of an employment relationship, we are sure that there was one,” Álvarez denounced. He conceded that the unions themselves have not usually brought this problem to the table, but he stressed that they intend to do so from now on: “I believe it is an issue that companies are not particularly interested in addressing, but we must do it. We want to include it in the next Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining —the general wage pact with employers, which serves as a guide for each negotiation table—.”
The report highlights that around 4,000 people die by suicide each year in Spain, according to the Ministry of Health. But, at the same time, it denounces that there are no figures to know how many are work-related: “Various indications suggest that the work environment significantly influences this.” The union believes that “a healthy, safe, and supportive work environment can protect mental health,” but that, on the contrary, “a toxic environment, with high levels of stress or harassment, can contribute to psychological suffering and act as a trigger for suicidal behavior.”
The report points to sectors with a higher risk of suicide, such as healthcare, security forces, agriculture, or construction, to which Álvarez has added call centers and the financial world. UGT indicates that there is a higher risk in activities with “access to and knowledge of potentially lethal methods,” where there is “resistance to seeking help in cases of mental disorders or situations of emotional exhaustion,” or where “the nature of the work requires exposure to difficult or traumatic experiences.”
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UGT’s Head of Occupational Health, Patricia Ruiz, has encouraged companies to strengthen suicide prevention and pay more attention to their employees’ occupational health. “Companies that do this save lives. We want this issue to become established in public debate and to reach prevention plans agreement by agreement,” said Ruiz, who also called for “debunking myths” surrounding suicide. “In the workplace context, combating myths helps executives, middle managers, and colleagues take signs of emotional suffering seriously and know how to respond, instead of ignoring them out of fear or ignorance.”
“In Spain, in recent years, cases have emerged where the work connection was evident. For example, there have been employee suicides attributed to situations of prolonged workplace harassment (mobbing), unsustainable workloads, or job insecurity,” UGT insists in its report, in which it calls for “better information systems that integrate the labor perspective.”
“Only with reliable data can we design more effective interventions,” adds the union, very critical of the Ministry of Health for not having included social agents in the , recently formed. “It is an unforgivable oversight, and I demand our presence,” said Álvarez. The UGT leader has made another request to the Government: to bring the reform of the occupational risk prevention law, which the unions agreed upon with the Ministry of Labor and employers rejected, to the Council of Ministers as soon as possible.