Of Chrysostom Chufi

A provision providing for a horizontal reduction in overtime contributions is being prepared by the Ministry of Labor on yet another initiative aimed at reducing non -wage costs heavy workers and businesses.

The reduction concerns the contributions paid for overwork, overtime, night work and Sundays and will concern not only specific sectors but the whole economy. The provision that is launched to proceed within the month if possible brought immediate benefit to the pocket of both the employee and the employer as the contributions will no longer be counted on increased earnings but on the basic hourly wage. That is, the employee will be paid for overtime but will pay – like the employer – of regular wage contributions.

Based on the legislation, the rates of salaries in force are:

  • 20% for overtime (ie the first time of employment after the scheduled time
  • 40% for overtime
  • 25% for night work
  • 75% for Sundays and holidays

Take, for example, an employee who works Sunday, so his hourly wage should be increased by 75%.

Suppose that with this surcharge its hourly wage is increased by 10 € if it was daily to 17.5 € gross.

The current regime should pay contributions of € 6.15 corresponding to € 2.34 to the employee (and therefore their pocket of € 15.16) and € 3.81 to the employer.

After the provision the contributions will be calculated on the basic wage, ie € 10, so they will drop to € 3.52, and will be divided € 1.34 to the employee and € 2.18 to the employer.

Therefore, the benefit to this example is 1 €/hour of employment on Sunday for the employee, so 8 € in eight hours and 16 €/month assuming that the employee works 2 Sundays a month (often happens on television for example).

Correspondingly, the benefit for the employer is € 1.63/h and € 13.04 in eight hours.

In another example, let’s get a worker who has worked 60 hours of night work within the month.

Based on a salary of € 10 again the benefit of the employee is € 19.8 and for the employer 32.4 €.

In addition to reinforcing the wallets of employers and workers, the Ministry of Labor expects the measure to act as an incentive so employers can declare the overtime work of their employees.

Already in this direction with admittedly spectacular results – which have largely led to the decision to reduce contributions to overtime – the digital work card operates, thanks to which (assisted of the dough fines provided), the stated overtime have increased. by 815,509 its years of operation. In some sectors, the increase in declared overtime exceeds 60%, which testifies to the magnitude of the problem of indicated or black work.

According to data from the ERGANI system in the sectors that the digital work card is already applied, the overtime increase was:

  • 60% in supermarkets (216,731 hours in 2024 versus 135,466 in 2021)
  • 38% in banks (82,236 hours in 2024 versus 59,470 in 2021)
  • 34% in industries (2,019,082 hours in 2024 versus 1,503,813 in 2023).
  • 28% in Security Companies (454,547 hours in 2024 versus 355,584 hours in 2022).

And yet the measure has not been fully applied to catering and tourism, branches that traditionally have significant overtime hours and 2/3 employees are declared as part -time.

This regulation of the Ministry of Labor is added to the reduction of insurance contributions by 1 unit (half for the employer and half for the employee) in force since the first January.

Since 2019, non -wage costs have decreased by 5.4 points while the government owes a reduction of half a further unit.