The Bank of Spain warns that short-time work will increase in the coming years due to the increase in part-time work, the increase in the weight of the service sector and the progressive demographic aging
The working day of Spanish workers has been shortened by more than an hour after the Covid-19 pandemic. This is confirmed by a report published this Monday by the Bank of Spain, which warns that this trend of reducing hours worked recorded in recent decades has been accelerated by the health crisis and will continue for years to come.
In concrete terms, although the number of people in work has more than recovered after the pandemic, hours per employee were 4% lower at the end of 2022 than three years earlier, mainly due to the increase in absenteeism, which is still at a high level after the covid (they explain a third of this drop), according to data from the Active Population Survey extracted by the Bank of Spain in this study.
The reduction in working hours caused by the pandemic is widespread among different population groups, regardless of their demographic and employment characteristics. The regulator thus concludes that there are no very differentiated behaviors between them, except in the case of temporary contracts, a group for which the working day remains furthest from pre-crisis levels.
This reduction in working hours is observed not only in the activities most affected by covid-19, such as transport and hotel industry, but also in the rest, and is more acute in trade, construction and industry, which is far from its historical profile. On the contrary, the working day has only become longer in the real estate sector and in agriculture.
Going back one to three decades, the average weekly working day in Spain has fallen from 37 hours in 1987 to 31.8 hours in 2019, representing a reduction of between 200 and 300 hours per worker, a drop of more than 14 %. It is true that part of this decline is due to technological progress, which has allowed productivity gains that give rise to an increase in hours devoted to leisure at the expense of those dedicated to work, according to the Bank of Spain, but this autumn It is to a greater extent the result of some structural changes in the Spanish economy – also extrapolated to a global level – such as the gradual integration of women into the labor market, the trend towards a higher percentage of part-time work, the greater the weight of the services sector in the economy and, more recently, the aging population.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
