The Impact of the Direct Participation of Workers on the Rates of Absenteeism in the Spanish Labor Environment

The aim of this research was to study the relationship between the different levels of direct participation of workers (passive, consultative or active-delegated) in risk prevention management with the levels of absenteeism in Spain. To this end, a transversal study was carried out using microdata from the Second European Survey of Companies on New and Emerging Risks (ESENER-2-Spain, 2014) with a master population of 3162 work centres. A multinomial logistic regression model was carried out, with the dependent variable being the levels of absenteeism and the independent variables, the participation indicators and preventive management, calculating the adjusted odds ratio (aOR) between all the independent and control variables, with their corresponding 95% confidence intervals (95% IC). The results obtained showed how the active-delegative participation of workers in the design and adoption of psychosocial risk prevention measures reported 2.33 less probabilities of having a very high or fairly high level of absenteeism (aOR = 0.43; 95%IC:0.27–0.69). However, having documented aspects of preventive management (plan, risk assessment, planning measures) did not have any impact on absenteeism levels, which shows that we can fall into an unrealistic institutional mirage of security with active policies of co-education or co-management being necessary to reduce absenteeism.