Is the Costa Rica monopoly taking advantage of the fact there is no competition and passing their inefficiencies downstream into the Costa Rica gasoline price?
Recope has been spending on overtime 30% of the money it pays in regular salaries. This high amount of overtime pay has been ongoing since 2010, leading to questions like why they don’t make changes to the schedule or amount of workers to avoid paying so much overtime.
Regular schedules are 8 hours during the day and 6 hours during the night. The Labor Code establishes that overtime cannot be a permanent schedule, rather something exceptional based on out of the ordinary company need.
Overtime is paid at time and a half. This added up to ₡3,082 million for last year, including daytime and nighttime overtime. That figure has not been below ₡3,000 million in the last decade.
Recope also pays out quite a bit in salary incentives for its 1,700 workers. There are bonuses for seniority, furthering education, working at heights and exposure to high temperatures.
