“Occurrence” or “invention without legal or legal basis”. This is what CEOE Tenerife and the Canarian Confederation of Entrepreneurs (CCE) think of the three-day self-discharge that the Ministry of Health has proposed in order to decongest primary care during the peak in care caused by influenza A. The two island employers reject that the worker himself can justify his temporary disability and they believe that with the measure, the central government “is ignoring it” and “is putting the “inefficiency” of the Spanish health system on the backs of businessmen.
A more suitable alternative to self-descent, according to the Regional Employment Counselor Jéssica de León, would be to count on the mutual insurance companies when prescribing registrations and cancellations for workers.. A proposal that the island employers also support. “I believe that the Canary Islands are in a position for their mutual insurance companies to carry out this function,” said de León, while also asking the central Executive for “greater clarity” about whether convalescents will be deducted from their salary for the three days they spend at home at home. consequence of his temporary disability. “We are in a situation of absolute uncertainty,” stated the counselor.
Until now, the law is clear: the first three days of rest will be paid by the worker, while the rest will be paid by the company.. However, the Canary Islands employers warn that the self-sales will have a cost for the majority of companies in the Archipelago. The president of CEOE Tenerife, Pedro Alfonso, points out that almost all collective agreements already compensate the worker “from day one”, with the aim that he does not suffer both a health problem and a financial disorder. “We have made an effort in recent years to ensure that this is the case in almost all sectors,” he emphasizes. As for companies that still do not have this coverage, José Cristóbal García, vice president of CCE, remembers that there are also costs to assume: “Whatever the agreement says, the company must always pay Social Security.”
How much would it cost a company to take a three-day self-sufficiency? In the Canary Islands, where the average salary is 1,836 euros per month, Employers estimate the cost of this permit at 1,996 euros for each worker.
At the national level, with an average salary of 2,092 euros per month, the cost of self-discharge would be around 2,274 euros. These data would include the effort that companies make to compensate their convalescent workers, the payment of social security as well as the loss of productivity.
Productivity is precisely one of the great problems of the Canary Islands economy, since the Islands hold the not very precious title of having the lowest in the country. Already the last Annual report of the Economic and Social Council of the Canary Islands (CES) reflected that if the Archipelago had the same productivity as the national average in its main sector – the tertiary –, it would have contributed a total of 10,960 million more euros to its Gross Domestic Product in 2022 ( GDP).
In this sense, García believes that self-employment would make the situation worse: “If you need to hire more workers to produce the same thing, the cost of the final product will be higher and productivity will fall.”. And this low productivity is not a lesser evil, since it causes the Canary Islands to be the Spanish region with the lowest per capita income. “We find it embarrassing that the EU has activated, on its own initiative, the increase in aid to the Canary Islands for having dropped below 65% of European income,” says Alfonso.
