The Government has agreed with the trade unions and autonomous communities on a Master Plan against Worker Exploitation (MPWE). This plan has caused a considerable debate between the socialist Government and the Spanish Confederation of Employers` Organizations over mandatory record keeping of workers’ daily hours.

The legal aspects of clocking in and out and keeping a record of the amount of time worked by employees are currently unclear. There have been legal judgements from the Lower Courts and appeals to the Supreme Court against previous judgements. Managers of Spanish companies are still in the dark about whether to keep track of their workers’ hours or not.

Since 2017 there has been an obligation to count the daily hours when:

A. There are part-time contracts.

B. For overtime.

C. When there are special holidays.

In addition, there are other obligations to consider, such as not exceeding eighty hours overtime per year for full-time contracts.

The new Master Plan against Labour Exploitation for the years 2018 – 2020 includes an important reform in the record keeping of the hours worked by employees. The goal is to oblige companies to keep records of these hours in order to crack down on fraud in companies for part-time work, fake self-employed job positions and internships.

According to the Government, the measure aims to “address the deterioration of working conditions that characterizes the Spanish labour market in the current stage of the last economic crisis.”

For its part, the Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (CEOE) refuses to force companies to keep a record of the number of working hours of their workers, for the following reasons: it believes that there are already time control mechanisms in place, it is a step backwards increasing bureaucracy and business costs. There are also severe procedural problems, internal flexibility is severely compromised and it is very difficult to put record keeping into practice in small and medium size companies.

However, despite the disagreement with the CEOE, everything indicates that the Government will make record keeping of workers` daily hours mandatory in their upcoming reform of Spanish labour laws.

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