The use of employee time cards is no longer a matter of company policy in Spain; it becomes compulsory on May 12th due to a new law. The intentions of the new regulation, however, differ from the dated motivation of companies desiring to track workers. This initiative arose out of consideration for the welfare of the worker, with the goal of reconciling work and personal life more feasible by holding companies accountable for abusive work hours and unpaid overtime, which are reportedly frequent in some traditional sectors of the Spanish labor market.
A month earlier, on April 12th, the mandate for a new register of workers’ working hours, contained in Royal Decree Law 8/2019 of 8 March, took effect, establishing that all persons employed in Spain must register the beginning and ending of their working day. Companies were allowed one month to implement a system, which expires May 12th.
Adapting to this new legal requirement is, today, one of the main priorities of SMEs and larger corporations. All of them – small, medium, and large enterprises – must comply with the new regulation. Failure to comply will result in corresponding administrative penalties, with amounts ranging between €626 and €6,250.
Given the complexity of defining a law that adapts to all the particularities of various jobs and companies, new wording in Article 34 of the Workers´ Statute leaves the way that each company carries out the registration and time control of its employees up to collective bargaining or company agreement. In the event that no agreement is reached, the company may establish the control method it prefers, after consulting with the employees. The time card registration must be kept for at least four years and be available to employees, their representatives, and the Labour and Social Security Inspectorate.
The text of the new law does not specify whether the register should be face-to-face or digital (for instance, in the case of telework), nor does it establish how to tailor to jobs with flexible working hours, although it does oblige companies to preserve preexisting flexibility. It therefore leaves to company discretion the choice of the system that best documents the daily working hours actually performed by each worker.
Adapting to the new regulations requires an additional administrative effort for which the large majority of companies are neither prepared nor have the time to do before May 12th. Yet noncompliance carries economic consequences, with penalties ranging between €626 and €6,250, as highlighted above.
Auxadi provides a solution
Thanks to next, our Microsoft-based cloud platform, any company can start documenting their employees´ daily time records comfortably and from the first day of the law´s effect. It is completely adaptable to any ERP or development environment, and also allows access and management of all financial and business information. It can also prepare reports, which is of particular importance with this new law.