It is estimated that in Spain there are 22.1 million Social Security affiliates. However, more than 1.2 million are on medical leave simultaneously. While employers suffer from the cost of absenteeism, which already represents 18.4 billion euros for the public coffers, the USO union denounces a smear campaign against the working class and health professionals.
Joaquín Pérez, general secretary of USO, dismantles in an exclusive interview for NoticiasTrabajo the speech that calls the Spanish employee “fraudulent” and criticizes the “mercantilist” drift that seeks to give more power to mutual insurance companies in the management of sick leave due to common illness.
“Maternity leave is not absenteeism”
One of the most critical points that Pérez points out is the statistical manipulation of absences. In 2025, total absenteeism reached 1.59 million people daily, but in that “bag” fundamental rights are mixed with unjustified absences.
“They make a tutun revolutum, They add up to a lot of hours and they say: ‘This means I don’t know how many billion euros a year for Spanish businesses,'” Pérez denounces. The union leader clarifies that issues that are, by law, paid leave are being counted as absenteeism: “Maternity or paternity leave, that is not absenteeism. “Paid leave for a death… that’s not absenteeism.”
For USO, this self-serving confusion seeks to establish the story that the worker is absent voluntarily, ignoring that the rate of 53.7 leave processes per 1,000 employees responds to a medical reality.
“Neither the workers pretend, nor the doctors are fraudulent with sick leave”
So why are the downturns lasting longer and longer? The most current data points to two factors: mental health, which already accounts for 18% of sick days, and the collapse of public health.
Joaquín Pérez strongly criticizes the idea that doctors grant sick leave in a lax manner: “It seems that there is hidden absenteeism, that workers in Spain are more mischievous or pretend more, or worse still, that doctors in Spain are more fraudulent than those in other countries because they give more sick leave. Obviously, this is not the case.”
The real problem, he maintains, is health saturation. “Why does a worker have to wait 6 months, 4 months or 3 months for an operation? Do we want to incorporate him without having had surgery?” he asks. And Pérez describes as “brotherhood” the proposals for gradual incorporations without having resolved the underlying ailment. “If my knee hurts, it hurts for 3 hours, but it doesn’t hurt for 6,” he says.
“Occupational health is being manipulated”
Although the mutual insurance companies only manage assistance in work accidents, the employers continue to pressure them so that they can provide medical discharge in any process. Given this, Pérez did not hesitate to give his opinion. “The purpose is to give a mutual company also casualties, rather than focusing on a prevention law,” he points out.
And the union warns that occupational health is being “manipulated” and “commercialized”, forgetting the true origin of the ailments. Faced with such a scenario, USO demands a paradigm shift and urges the administration, as well as employers, to carry out an introspection exercise on the production model and the quality of employment.
“The central problem of employment is precariousness, it is not absenteeism,” he says. For the secretary general, the question that no one wants to answer is nothing more than: “What is happening at work for people to get sick in this way?
The union concludes that, as long as psychosocial risks are not addressed and public health is not streamlined, sick leave will continue to be the symptom of a labor market that puts profit before the physical and mental integrity of those who support it.