Leave of absence to care for children shoots up 45% due to the drop in teleworking and salary improvements

The number of people who request a leave of absence from work to be able to care for their children has skyrocketed by 45% year-on-year in the first six months of the year, to 24,942 employees, compared to the 17,140 who opted for this option in the same period. 2022, according to Social Security data.

This is an unprecedented increase that had not occurred in any year since 2012, when the data series began, and that occurs after three years (2020, 2021 and 2022) of continuous decreases in the number of leaves of absence. requested.

This rise in the number of leaves of absence is not justified by a greater number of births in the country, as might be expected. In fact, between January and May of this year (latest data available), in Spain there have been 129,306 births, according to the INE, compared to the 132,331 that occurred in the first five months of 2022, 2.3% less.

Despite the drop in the birth rate and the fact that fewer families have children, those that do find it more difficult to combine their working career with paternity/maternity, which is why they resort to leaving work in one of the cases, usually that of Mother.

The irruption of the pandemic three years ago meant that many companies in the country adopted teleworking -at first out of obligation, due to home confinement, and later, as a precaution, to avoid contagion in the office- hence families found it easier to reconcile personal and professional life, which caused a continued decrease in the number of requested leaves of absence.

However, the relative return to normality in labor relations and in-person attendance has caused this trend to change again. According to data from the Active Population Survey for the second quarter of this year, 17.9 million workers in the country do not work from home even a single day of the week (compared to the 14.6 million who were in this situation in 2020). ), with which the return to the office has had an impact on the rise in furloughs.

Another -more positive- factor that may explain this rebound is the fact that the Spanish economy has recovered its pre-pandemic levels and that the labor market is behaving extraordinarily, which generates confidence among workers regarding the maintenance of the employment. In addition, especially after the agreement between employers and unions, salaries are rising in the country, which could lead some families to feel more secure in order to leave one of the two jobs temporarily.

In any case, beyond the rise that has occurred since 2020, the number of leaves of absence requested in Spain is now much higher than it was in 2012, the year in which the registry began, when 16,691 leaves of absence were requested in the first half of the year. At that time, the Spanish economy was in recession and the unemployment rate stood at 24.8%, more than double the current rate, which could also discourage the request for these permits.

A women's problem

Mothers are the ones who mostly take leave to care for their children. Of the total number of workers who have requested it up to June, 21,089 were women and only 3,853 were men.

This means that 84.5% of leaves of absence are requested by women. They are the ones who sacrifice their working life for two different reasons or a combination of both: they tend to have a lower salary than their father, which makes it more profitable for the family nucleus if they stop working, and/or Historically, it is women who have been in charge of caring for their children, so in the event that one of the two parents leaves their job to face this task, they are the ones who occupy this role.

In addition, the lack of public places in nurseries that facilitate reconciliation with work life forces many families to have to hire professional caregivers, with which the expense involved is similar to what is lost when requesting a leave of absence. .

Although it is dramatic that for every five women who request a leave of absence, only one man does; The truth is that statistics show an improvement in this proportion. In 2012, 93.7% of leaves of absence were requested by mothers and only 6.2% were for fathers, compared to the percentages of 84.5% and 15.5% that are currently registered.

Even so, they continue to bear the brunt of the reconciliation problem in the country. In total, 689,800 workers are inactive (not looking for a job) because they have to take care of family members -children, the elderly or the sick-, of whom 91.2% are women; while 378,800 workers have a part-time job and not full-time because they have to deal with this task, of which 94% are women.

Both groups have experienced significant growth in the last decade: those who are inactive for this reason have grown by 26.7% and those employed part-time by 37.1%, which shows that the reconciliation problem in the country worsens in a context of lack of children.