A support tool for working time bargaining by considering individual time accounts and annual leave

Abstract

Working time accounts (WTAs) are employer-oriented flexibility systems that have been applied in industry but could be used far more. Their use is limited by the complexity of planning them, assessing their financial benefits and establishing suitable compensation for workers. To overcome these drawbacks we define a planning model that takes into account work performance per task per worker, individual annual leave, the use of WTAs and the use of overtime. A four-stage process is proposed: Stage 1 deals with annual leave and the linear consideration of the cost of the lack of capacity; Stage 2 with annual leave and the non-linear consideration of the lack of capacity (but only for the periods during which holidays can be established); Stage 3 with minimising costs (once the holidays selected in Stage 2 are fixed, i.e. the holidays are considered as data) and Stage 4 with minimising capacity slack and excess capacity by minimising costs. A computational experiment based on the different periods of annual leave is used to calculate the financial benefit generated by WTAs in each case and to assess possible compensations for workers.

Keywords:

• working time
• working time accounts
• capacity planning

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of grant DPI2004-05797 (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, Spain, and FEDER). The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, which have helped to enhance this article.