Treasury Loses 80 Million Hours Per Year Due To Employees' Paid Holidays

The economic expert, Fares Masdour, called on the Prime Minister, Ahmed Ouyahia, to review the system of paid holidays in Algeria and the duty of working during the religious and national days.

He said in a study that he handed down on Sunday that the public treasury lost annually by 333,000 DZD because the workers in Algeria benefited from paid holidays or the equivalent of 80 million hours, which is the equivalent of billions of dinars, which makes the raising of exports outside the hydrocarbons to more than one billion dollars an impossible objective, in case there is no doubling of productivity.

Masdour said in a statement to Echorouk that the paid holidays are now, in light of the difficult financial situation of the treasury due to the continuation of the oil crisis and the depletion of the resources of the Income Control Fund and the erosion of exchange reserves, which will knock the doors of $ 97 billion soon, require the recruitment of all possibilities to rationalize expenses and double the cost of labor and the promotion of labor values, which is contrary to the major losses that are incurred by Algeria annually due to these holidays.

“Government’s program, which includes raising production capacity in Algeria and doubling exports to more than one billion dollars, will necessarily necessitate raising the cost of labor and production, and to devote the principle of compulsory work and encourage productivity 24 hours a day by running three shifts even during the weekends, as is the case in Japan and many countries that have achieved a boom in the economy over the past half century”.

Experts have estimated the value of public treasury losses annually due to paid holidays, absences, delays, illness holidays and religious and national events by more than 10 billion DZD or the equivalent of 1.5 billion dollars, calling on the government to adopt a new strategy to raise the profitability of workers, especially at the level of public administrations and institutions, as they revealed that the size of the losses of the public treasury, which would be called a paid holiday is equivalent to 1.5 billion dollars, warning about the cost of work and the decline in working hours in public administrations and bodies. 

They confirmed the need to work according to the policy of alternation and continuous work in order to compensate for the losses.