The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration publishes for the first time the statistics of effective hours worked and hours contributed calculated from the data on social contributions paid by companies.
These data will be published quarterly with a series starting in January 2019, the first data available.
This is a statistic based on administrative data, prepared from the hours contributed and the employment relationships per contributor reported to Social Security. To calculate the effective hours worked, it is necessary to deduct the hours of workers in a situation of ERTE, temporary disability and receiving other benefits (birth and childcare benefits, risk during breast-feeding and risk during pregnancy). These quoted hours corrected for these suspensive situations or, what is the same, hours actually worked, are 8.5% higher in the second quarter of 2023 than in the last quarter of 2019.
Furthermore, to avoid the volatility that exists between different quarters and to be able to appreciate the medium-term evolution of effective hours worked, the new report includes an index based on the 4-quarter moving average. This index stood at 107.3 points in the second quarter of 2023, with 100 being the figure corresponding to the last quarter of 2019, so that this new statistical report would see an increase in effective hours worked of 7.3% compared to the level prior to the pandemic.
The evolution shown by this index largely coincides with the data corresponding to the Quarterly Labor Cost Survey (ETCL) of the INE, which shows an increase of 8.1% in effective hours worked compared to the pre-pandemic period. The enormous coincidence both in level and in temporal evolution of two very different statistics provides robustness to the behaviour that is deduced from them. On the other hand, as can be seen in the same graph, both statistics are significantly higher than those observed in the statistics of the Active Population Survey (EPA) and the Quarterly National Accounts (CNTR), according to which in the second quarter of 2023, effective hours worked would have barely increased by 1.2-1.4% compared to the pre-pandemic level. It is also observed that a break in the relationship of these series occurs from the end of 2021.
This increase in effective hours worked is fundamentally due to the combination of the increase in the number of people affiliated with Social Security in this period, and the fact that the effective hours for each contributor are 2% higher than pre-pandemic levels.
