The CCOO union in the Canary Islands has launched a campaign to "disprove" the employers' "discourse" on absenteeism, which it disassociates from low productivity on the islands.
The technical cabinet of the trade union center has prepared the report #AbsentismoDeLaVerdad, which will be released as part of this campaign, in which it "dismantles the employers' discourse that working people in the Canary Islands do not go to work and that this is undermining the economy."
The data handled by CCOO points to the Canary Islands as the autonomous community with the worst position in terms of work-life balance because it is where people work the most in shifts (30.8%) and where people work the most on Saturdays (44.6%); the second where people work the most on Sundays (31.5%) and where people work the most until the end of the afternoon (20.5%) and at night (7.4%).
CCOO accuses business organizations of talking about absenteeism in "situations such as permits, vacations, leaves and temporary disabilities, among other labor rights that have cost so much to win."
Causes of low productivity according to CCOO
In its report, the union offers data "that do affect" productivity, such as the region factor, work organization, collective bargaining, work-life balance, or the specialization of the Canary Islands economy in service sector activities and mainly in those linked to tourism.
It points out that 38.7% of workers in the archipelago say they have little or no influence on the order and content of their tasks, when the Spanish average is 33.6%, which is "a directly influential factor" in productivity.
The CCOO Canarias report emphasizes that there is no relationship between absenteeism and productivity and cites the Basque Country as an example, which has the highest rate of absenteeism but is also the regional economy with the highest ratios of apparent labor productivity.
It concludes that the causes of the productivity levels recorded in the Canary Islands lie in other issues, and apart from that, it stresses that there are levels of productivity in the islands "much higher" than the national average in information and communications activities, financial and insurance activities, and artistic, recreational and entertainment activities.
