The Mecuida Plan, one of the Government’s most emblematic measures to fight the effects of the pandemic, has reached just a few hundred workers during the two years it has been in force. According to official data, only 459 people have used this mechanism to reduce working hours (accompanied by a corresponding salary reduction) designed specifically for caring for family members affected by covid or by the measures taken to prevent the transmission of the virus (for example, the closure of schools or nursing homes). In addition, despite the fact that this policy wanted to avoid “the perpetuation of roles [de género]”, 78.4% of those who resorted to it were womenas reported by El Periódico de España.
Although the Mecuida plan has been described as “essential & rdquor; by its promoter, the Minister of Labor, and it has been renewed to the beat of other key anticovid policies, such as the erte or aid to the self-employed, Until now, the Government had not provided data of its operation. This newspaper has obtained them from Social Security via consultation to the Transparency Portal. The figures show that since its launch on March 18, 2020, until the last available data -March 15, 2022- 360 women and 99 men have taken advantage of the reduction in working hours specifically cataloged as Mecuida.
No financial support
The Mecuida Plan was formulated for the first time in the first compendium of anticovid emergency regulations, Royal Decree-Law 8/2020, of March 17 of the year in which the pandemic broke out. Since then, it has been extended seven times under the same conditions; if there is no new extension, it will be in force until June 30 of this year. It contemplates the right of workers to adapt or reduce their working day if they prove “duties of care with respect to the spouse or de facto partner” or of “relatives by consanguinity up to the second degree [padres, madres, abuelos, hijos y nietos]” in three cases related to covid-19: due to the direct effect of the virus, because it is forced by any of the measures adopted by the administrations to prevent the spread of the pandemic, or because the person who until then had been in charge of such care could not do it. The reduction of working hours must be requested 24 hours in advance, and implies a salary reduction of the same proportion: a 60% reduction in working hours implies receiving 60% less salary; Reducing the working day completely entails not receiving salary.
The Controversy has always surrounded the Mecuida Plan for not including financial aid for people who take advantage of the measures to reduce working hours; a possibility that was considered in the early stages of the pandemic but that never materialized. It has also been criticized as “discriminatory”, for example by the USO union, for not taking into account “the unequal starting point of men and women both at work and at home”, which means that “those who mostly take advantage of this plan, and specifically the reductions in working hours, are women”. In the words of the Secretary of Communication and Trade Union Studies of this center, Laura Estévez, “99% of the queries about the Mecuida Plan that we have received in USO were from women. It has fulfilled a task of protecting those who had to stay at home, but it has not changed at all the role of who should accompany them”.
There is a widespread impression among human resources professionals that Mecuida’s usage figures are so low because workers and companies have managed on their own without resorting to this program. “During the pandemic, flexibility measures have been used (teleworking, compensation and adjustments to the working day, recoverable hours, permits…) that are not recorded as Mecuida,” explains Daniel Blas, a social graduate and labor advisor. “Only the figures of people who reduce their working day are officially collected, because in that case it must be communicated to the General Treasury of the Social Security so as not to generate contributions for the time not worked. But there is no record in the official records, for example, changes in shifts or functions; you don’t have to go through formal procedures to register them, so they are not counted,” he asserts. Estévez adds that “in many of the cases -also in the Public Administration- the problem has been that the company took advantage of organizational causes to deny the adaptation. For this reason, it is not surprising that so few people have finally appeared in statistics, since many have had to reconcile based on unpaid permits, vacations or leave of absence”.
According to the official figures provided by the Transparency Portal, the month in which Mecuida has been used the most has been the last available, March 2022, with 46 cases (37 women and 9 men). Otherwise, the months with the most recourse to this formula for reducing working hours are located at the beginning of the pandemic, in 2020: July (41), October (40), and April and May (38). In 2021, the highest figure occurred in October (24), and the peak of the sixth wave also registered a relatively high figure, compared to the rest of the period of validity of this measure: 21 reductions in the Mecuida working day in January this year.