The pathologies of the Spanish labor market include Absence is one of the biggest scandals. From an administrative point of view they are euphemistically defined as temporary incapacity (IT), from an economic point of view they represent a monumental and deliberate failure of institutional design.
Not from a random epidemiological phenomenon, but from the rational response of workers to a perverse incentive system that discourages effort and encourages inaction. In Spain 2026 the absence became a protected event that turned into an acquired derecho, driven by a government whose legislative populism has eroded the pillars of individual responsibility.
The magnitude of the problem is reflected in a bloody international comparison: Spain’s absenteeism rate has dropped to 7.2%, far higher than the European Union (4.8%) and Eurozone (5.1%) averages. These figures are neither a statistical anomaly nor an economic episode, but rather a confirmation that Spain can boast the dubious honor of leading the European ranking of work inactivity and systematically occupying the first places in the EU ranking.
In this sense, the X-ray presented by the Autoridad Independiente de Responsabilidad Fiscal (AIReF) is an addendum to the work policy of the executive. Power gas for IT exceeded 21,000 million euros per year (including direct costs and loss of income due to promotion), a figure that cannot be justified by the demographic climate or the morbidity of the population.
AIReF exposes the inefficiency of a bicephalic and dysfunctional system: public health care is cut with alarming laxity, while the Mutuals that take on the financial burden are deprived of real competence to provide high quality medical care. This power asymmetry is the ideal cultivation heat to initiate deception.
The worker must take a fraction of the cost of his inactivity to restore the ethical bond between presence and reward
Absenteeism in Spain is an inevitable by-product of hyper-regulation and employer disarmament. Extreme work gate protection eliminated the opportunity cost of absence. In a healthy labor market, the worker is obliged to internalize this; In the Spanish statist-collectivist model, these costs are socialized and integrally transferred to the company’s balance sheet and to the state treasury.
If wage payment levels are guaranteed that systematically reach 100% of net wages through participation in hypertrophied collective agreements, the labor base becomes a more attractive option than employment: So if the same is achieved by eliminating relocation costs, time and effort.
This situation contrasts with the current mayorship of EU countries. With France, the UK and Scandinavian countries experiencing “care days” – an initial period when a worker recovers lost income – to prevent fraudulent incentives, the Spanish government has taken the opposite route: absolute permissiveness.
In Spain, the governing coalition built an oasis of impunity where personal responsibility was replaced by permissive administrative protection that destroy any moral or material incentive to quickly reintegrate into the work station.
The impact on the product is undoubtedly devastating. In one country, Spain, with one of the most average current OECD products, absenteeism acts as an invisible and massive burden affecting product unity, depressing real wages and pushing PYMES out of the global market.
Because the government ignores the basic laws of economics, absenteeism is only a figure in assumption and, say, a means of getting votes with deadly tolerance; For employers, this is sabotage of their organizational capacity. Spanish society is obliged to internalize costs that cannot be managed or controlled, resulting from the small inversion of capital and from the structural insecurity that its government claims is the fault of “capitalism”.
This shameful system needs to be reformed. but accept the delay. It is imperative to unify IT management, to provide each other with full diagnostic, treatment and, above all, high medical capacity, thereby eliminating public health protection captured by bureaucratic inertia.
On the other hand, the logic of mandatory scarcity needs to be introduced and cannot be supplemented for convenience. The worker must bear a fraction of the cost of his inactivity restore the ethical bond between presence and reward.
Finally, there is an urgent need to restore the company’s right to terminate contracts based on repeated absenteeism and to give control of production to a person who assumes the risk of capital.
In conclusion, absenteeism in Spain is not a health crisis, it is a crisis of incentives caused by the government’s populist interventionism. AIReF’s information is an indictment against a model that rewards work and punishes those who work for companies.
Without an end to totalitarianism that reintroduces individual responsibility and economic realism, Spain will continue to slide down the slope of productive insignificance. Social protection cannot be enforced by institutionalized parasitism.
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