The Cantabrian employers' association joins Feijóo's discourse on absenteeism: "Absolutely everyone knows it exists"

The Cantabrian employers' association has once again focused on absenteeism and fraudulent medical leave. The president of CEOE-Cepyme Cantabria, Enrique Conde, has defended the campaign launched by the business organization to denounce this phenomenon and has maintained that it is a known problem, although, in his opinion, it is difficult to address publicly due to the "Latin mentality" existing in society.

For the business leader, the difficulty does not lie in the existence of fraud, but in the lack of willingness to recognize it publicly. "Absolutely everyone knows it exists," he stated during an interview granted to 'EFE', in which he justified the need to open a debate on this issue.

Conde insisted that the employers' initiative does not question justified medical leave, but only those it considers fraudulent. In that sense, he defended that society must be "daring" and "denounce the colleague next to them" when, according to his words, "they are taking advantage of the public service that we all pay for with our taxes."

In his opinion, within absenteeism there is "an important core" that responds to fraudulent conduct and that ends up harming both companies and other workers, by increasing the workload and affecting productivity. Thus, he described this phenomenon as "a scourge" that, he maintains, is behind the loss of competitiveness of many companies and the closure of small and medium-sized enterprises. He also assured that it harms workers who comply with their obligations and citizens who expect to receive a service.

In addition, he pointed to the National Social Security Institute and the lack of coordination between the health and administrative systems as part of the problem. In his opinion, both administrations and business organizations must sit down to analyze a situation that he considers "very complex" and for which he demands solutions.

The Cantabrian employers' association joins Feijóo's controversial "cancer"

Conde's words add to a controversy that Alberto Núñez Feijóo had opened weeks earlier before Basque businessmen, when he described absenteeism as a "cancer" and questioned whether collective agreements allow for the same remuneration to be received when working as when not attending the workplace. The leader of the PP then estimated the cost of absenteeism at 30,000 million euros and placed the number of people who, according to his data, do not attend their workplace daily at 1.16 million.

Feijóo's statements then generated strong controversy, as they indiscriminately equated unjustified absences with medical leaves certified by a doctor, something that unions and several technical reports pointed out as a conceptual error that stigmatizes legitimately sick workers.