The estimated figure of Labor casualties that there is every day in Spain is one and a halfa figure that, according to the Bank of Spain, has practically doubled in these last five years.
Spain is one of the European countries that accumulates the most work casualties, and this is an economic hole for social security coffers: we are talking about more than 15,000 million euros, the equivalent of 1 % of the GDP of Spain. An expense that, since 2019, has shot almost 80 %.
But why have the work casualties shot so much? “I think they are the first insolidaries with their colleagues, not with the company, but with their own colleagues. How do you manage a company, an industry, if you are missing people?” He says Antonio Garamendi, president of La Coee.
However, and before these words, it is important to make it clear that a work decline is not chosen by the worker, but that it is a medical professional who justifies it and who has the last word.
“Being low is not a crime. There is a professional who diagnoses me a pathology, understands that my working conditions interfere negatively in my recovery process and, therefore, I am prescribed a decline,” says Alfonso Ríos, head of Occupational Health of CCOO Euskadi.
And he adds: “This is completely legal and cannot be called absenteeism, because it is fully justified. Who uses this term, that of absenteeism, shows an intention to criminalize the people who are on a medical leave.”
Some of the main reasons that explain this increase are the following:
- The aging of the working population
- The greatest awareness of mental health, formerly invisible
- A collapsed health system
With respect to this last reason, the collapse derived from the progressive dismantling of an increasingly weakened primary care It makes, many times, the diagnosis slows down. Thousands of people spend months waiting for a verdict or a resolution on their work decline.
And so explain it Luis González, health of the Andalusian Health System: “It takes 15 days when the family doctor sees you, or more; it takes months when the specialist sees you or does a test. All that are periods in which the person is sick, without finishing diagnosing, and possibly prolonging the work leaves.”
