Trade unions up in arms against hiring detectives to monitor public workers on sick leave in Fuengirola

Trade unions UGT, CCOO and CSIF have jointly accused Fuengirola's local government of "criminalising" the more than 800 civil servants by deciding to hire private detectives to monitor them during their sick leave. According to the specifications of the contract, the initiative is justified by the "high absenteeism" in the town - 10%, compared to the 7% national average.

All the unions agree that "absenteeism cannot be solved with detectives" and that social dialogue, collective agreement and regulations for the prevention of occupational hazards should be the way to deal with any similar problem. General secretary of the CCOO union in Malaga province Fernando Cubillo said that the town hall's approach is "what bad managers do". He said that the local government's rhetoric only serves to "set the public against all civil servants, both those on sick leave and those who are not".

For CSIF, this is a measure "disproportionate and potentially harmful to workers' rights". The union has urged the town hall to comply with its "obligations in terms of occupational risk prevention", "respect medical competence" and adopt other measures, such as "requesting reports and collaboration from the prevention service and the mutual insurance company to determine the possible causes" of the situation, "improving the organisation of work, reviewing workloads and adopting preventive measures". In addition, the civil servants' union pointed out that the evaluation of jobs in the town hall is being negotiated, so it considers that this is "a clear measure of pressure that could even violate workers' rights".

Antonio González from UGT also accused the local government of "entering a dangerous drift" and of "questioning the system" because sick leave is granted by doctors and there are "filters" such as medical inspections. "We criticise the use of public money for these purposes, when the system already has its own control mechanisms," he said.

CSIF has sent a letter to Fuengirola town hall to defend "the medical criteria and the presumption of veracity of the reports of temporary incapacity", while warning that "the assignment of a situation of temporary incapacity corresponds exclusively to the doctor or medical team of the SAS, the mutual insurance companies or the INSS", depending on the contingency. But "neither the town hall nor any private entity contracted by the administration has the competence to question the medical assessment or to determine the situation of incapacity for work of a worker".

González criticised "the total opacity" with which the government team acts by refusing to provide the unions with official statistic using "the excuse of data protection". Cubillo urged the town hall to make the data on absenteeism public "through the media and the transparency portal".

According to Cubillo, the town hall is "more concerned with discrediting the public sector" than defending it. He invited the Fuengirola leaders to stand up to the "deterioration, at historic levels" that the Andalusian public health system is experiencing, instead of being "accomplices" in this situation. "When the sick leave is due to a common illness, it is the public health system that intervenes. It takes more than a year to be given an appointment with a specialist and this leads to a deterioration in health," Cubillo said.

He also reminded the local government that, in March 2015, two workers from the operational services of the Fuengirola town hall died while working in the street, "without any prior assessment of occupational risks". According to the CCOO, 78% of the sick leave registered in the province is due to accidents or occupational diseases. "According to the latest data, there are 65 sick leaves a day for these reasons," Cubillo said.