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ScopeGroup 9 agreement · public works categories of the state cataloguePeriod1958 – 2031Public procurement record (OCDS), cross-checked Uruguayan press and the cited laws

Construction collective agreement

Four hours less: what construction won, and where the bill lands

On 15 August 2026 SUNCA and the employer chambers signed a five-year agreement cutting the working week from 44 to 40 hours with no pay cut. The public argument filled up with unsourced percentages. We went after the one stretch that the public procurement record can actually measure: the channel through which construction labour costs reach the state budget.

−9.09%
fewer hours per week — not −10%: the week goes from 44 to 40
At constant weekly pay, hourly cost rises +10.00%. Two different numbers, and several outlets published them as if they were one.
20.59%
of the peso side of the largest works contract on record is parametric adjustment plus social contributions
OSE, Public Tender 24711/2023. Not an estimate: two named price lines in the published award.
159,853 million
pesos awarded by the state in works categories between 2019 and 2026
9,874 awards. Seven contracts are 71.56% of it: six road schemes and one prison complex.
4 of 4
cost figures that circulated in the press cite no study
The 9% labour cost, the 10% works cost, the 5.5% sale price and the 30% productivity gap. No article names the source.

On 4 August 2026 SUNCA and the construction employer chambers announced a pre-agreement. The union assembly approved it on 13 August and it was signed on the 15th at the National Labour Directorate. The agreement runs from April 2026 to March 2031. It cuts the week from 44 to 40 hours in four steps between 2027 and 2030, with no pay cut.

From there the argument moved to costs, and that is where it broke down. The percentages that circulated — 9% higher hourly labour cost, 10% higher works cost, 5.5% higher house sale price — are attributed to "international comparative studies" that no outlet names. We went looking for them and they are not there.

This site cannot measure wages: the procurement record does not hold them. It can measure one thing nobody measured, and it is specific to the state. When the state contracts works, the price is not fixed. The standard public works conditions provide for parametric formulas, and the labour index feeding them is built from the wage council rate. So the agreement signed by the union and the chambers reprices, by design, what the taxpayer pays.

The size of that channel shows up in the price lines. In the largest works contract on record — the OSE sanitation scheme awarded in 2024 to SACEEM, CIEMSA, TEYMA and a Brazilian firm — the award publishes 416 price lines. Among them are 80 lines called "Ajuste Paramétrico" worth 3,408 million pesos and 151 lines called "LL SS" — social contributions — worth 2,824 million. Together they are 20.59% of the peso side, and the contract has lines budgeted through 2029.

That is enough for a calculation the debate never made. If labour plus its social contributions is 20.16% of that contract, a 10% rise in hourly cost adds about 2% to the contract, not the 10% that was published. For a works contract to rise 10% through this channel, labour would have to be nearly the whole cost. It is not, in any contract we could open.

Method

What was agreed, exactly

The agreement covers Group 9, subgroup 01, "Construction industry and complementary activities". It runs five years, April 2026 to March 2031. It is the first agreement in the sector of that length, and both sides called it historic for that before they called it historic for the hours.

The week falls by one hour a year in four steps. The cut does not touch pay. Firms may apply it two ways: one hour less Monday to Thursday, or up to four hours less on Friday. The chambers asked for that flexibility and it is in the text.

The agreement includes a 5.17% pay rise backdated to April 2026 and annual rises each April through 2030, with inflation correctives. It guarantees real wage growth across the period. It also adds reinstatement of workers on unemployment insurance, 8 million pesos to reimburse preventive medical checks for workers over 40, one paid hour per half-year for mental health activities, double the work clothing deliveries from April 2028 and a 120-day deadline to agree a heat protocol.

The dispute before it lasted more than 120 days. Union general secretary Javier Díaz counted 126 days of struggle. Labour minister Juan Castillo and construction chamber president Alejandro Ruibal both used the word "historic".

The earlier wins, with the law behind each

The union calls what it won over 68 years "conquistas". The list below only includes those with a law or a verifiable fact behind them. Those without one are left out, even where the union claims them.

  1. 11 May 1958

    SUNCA is founded

    First national congress of the single construction union. The union later takes part in founding the National Workers Convention.

  2. 7 August 1975

    Unified construction contribution

    Law 14,411 creates a contribution regime specific to the sector. A single percentage on wages covers pensions, health and payroll charges. The party liable is the property owner, not the contractor. The rate today is 71.8%, rising to 75.8% with the professionals fund levy.

  3. 26 December 2007

    Severance and retirement fund

    Law 18,236 creates the sector fund. When a worker leaves the industry for good, for any reason, they collect everything held in their individual account. On death it goes to the spouse or heirs.

  4. 2008

    The week falls from 48 to 44 hours

    The direct precedent for the 2026 agreement. The sector was the first to go below the 48-hour legal week by collective agreement, eighteen years before going to 40.

  5. 15 August 2026

    The week falls from 44 to 40 hours

    Five-year agreement, stepped reduction between 2027 and 2030, no pay loss, annual rises through 2030.

The arithmetic of four hours

Going from 44 to 40 hours produces two different percentages, and the coverage mixed them. The first measures hours. The second measures cost per hour. They are not the same number and cannot stand in for each other.

The third number is the one that matters for total cost, and it rests on an assumption almost nobody stated. If the job needs the same number of working hours, the firm must add 10% more hours to do the same work, and the wage bill rises 10%. If output per hour improves, it rises less. The construction chamber president put it in those terms: "the industry's productivity is not protected by the man-hour alone".

The figures that circulated, and what happened when we went after them

These four figures framed the argument about the cost of the agreement. None of the four arrives with the study behind it. What follows does not say they are false: it says that, as published, they cannot be verified.

9%

What was said

Immediate rise in hourly labour cost.

What we found

The article names no study. Also, 9.09% is how much hours FALL; hourly cost rises 10.00%. The figure looks like the wrong one of the two.

inconsistenteUruguay Al Día

10%

What was said

Rise in total works cost from cutting four hours at constant pay.

What we found

No study is named. For works cost to rise 10% off a 10% rise in hourly cost, labour would have to be nearly 100% of cost. In the largest works contract on record it is 20.16%.

inconsistenteUruguay Al Día, citing "international comparative studies"

5.5%

What was said

Immediate rise in the final sale price of a home.

What we found

No study cited and no method. A home sale price depends on land, financing and demand, not only on works cost.

sin fuente citadaUruguay Al Día

30%

What was said

Uruguayan hourly productivity is 30% below the OECD member average.

What we found

Attributed to the OECD with no year and no publication. Uruguay is not an OECD member, so the comparison needs to say which aggregate it is against.

sin fuente citadaLa Mañana

Where labour cost enters the budget

A collective agreement binds the firms in the sector, not the state. But the state is a client of those firms, and its works contracts are not fixed-price. The standard public works conditions provide for parametric formulas with labour and materials coefficients declared in the tender documents. The labour index is built from the wage council rate: when the rate moves, the index moves.

That makes the state the party carrying labour cost risk on public works. A private buyer facing a rising price can postpone the job. The progress certificates the state pays absorb the parametric variation and carry on. The difference is not one of size: it is who gets to say no.

The procurement record shows this without any interpretation, because four bodies publish the award broken out by price line. The largest of them is OSE.

OSE · Public Tender 24711/2023

Universal Sanitation Project for Uruguay. Awarded 26 July 2024 to SACEEM, CIEMSA, TEYMA URUGUAY and FAST Indústria e Comércio. 416 price lines, with items budgeted through 2029.

Total awarded30,266,489,897 pesos + US$ 81,031,355

Price linePesosOf the peso side
Works (global and unit items)84 peso lines. Another 18 lines, worth US$ 81,031,355, are in dollars and are outside this percentage.22,875,003,79475.58%
Parametric adjustment80 lines, one per year and item group, 2024 to 2029. This is the line through which a cost change reaches the price the body pays.3,407,843,45911.26%
Social contributions (LL SS)151 lines. This is the Law 14,411 unified contribution, charged as a percentage of wages.2,823,784,7929.33%
Contingencies83 lines, each with its own parametric adjustment and its own associated social contributions.1,159,857,8523.83%

Finding

The social contributions line lets you work back to the wage bill. The unified contribution is now 71.8% of pay for staff working directly on site. If that 2,824 million line is exactly that percentage, the contract's contributable wage bill is on the order of 3,933 million pesos: 12.99% of the peso side.

Wages plus social contributions come to 6,757 million. That is 22.32% of the peso side and 20.16% of the whole contract, counting the dollar portion. A 10% rise in hourly cost, if the contract needs the same number of hours, adds about 676 million pesos: around 2.0% of the contract.

The derivation carries three stated assumptions. First, that the whole social contributions line sits under the 71.8% regime and excludes the professionals fund levy. Second, that labour outside the on-site regime — office, management, transport — is not in that line. Third, that the body budgeted the items at the rates in force when it awarded. All three push the estimate the same way: the real wage bill may be somewhat above 3,933 million, not below.

How big public works are in the record

Between 2019 and 2026 the state awarded 159,853 million pesos in works categories of the state catalogue — family 6, "Construction, improvements and extraordinary repairs" — across 9,874 awards. The series is highly concentrated: seven contracts are 71.56% of the total.

The seven are six road schemes and one prison complex. The six road schemes are design, build, operate and finance contracts from the National Roads Directorate — circuits 3, 5 and 6, the two Grupo Vial Oriental contracts and San José — all denominated in indexed units. The seventh is the rehabilitation centre with three detention units at Libertad, San José, awarded by the Interior Ministry in 2024.

The visible face of parametric adjustment is smaller than that, and it has to be said precisely. Across the whole corpus, 1,188 purchases publish items with a parametric adjustment line, and they come from four bodies: OSE, UTE, the National Ports Administration and the Montevideo city government. In those purchases parametric adjustment is 8.90% of the amount and social contributions 6.46%. The OSE sanitation contract is three quarters of that aggregate, so the percentage mostly describes that one contract.

One last figure, because it links both ends of this story. The construction chamber president who signed the agreement, Alejandro Ruibal, is a director of SACEEM. SACEEM holds 48,034 million pesos awarded by the state across 130 purchases, measured by its tax ID in both spellings the record uses. That describes no irregularity. It describes that the person negotiating the sector's labour cost is also one of the state's largest contractors.

What this measurement cannot say

  • The procurement record holds no wages. We cannot measure what a construction worker earns, or how the agreement changes it. Everything about pay here comes from the press and from law, not from the corpus.
  • Parametric adjustment is only visible where the body publishes the award broken out by price line. Four do: OSE, UTE, Ports and the Montevideo city government. The National Roads Directorate, the largest works buyer on record, does not publish its contracts with that breakdown. The formula exists all the same — it is in the standard conditions — but it cannot be measured from outside.
  • Estimating the wage bill from the social contributions line is a derivation, not a published figure. The three assumptions are stated above. If one fails the labour share moves, though not nearly enough to approach the 100% that the circulated 10% figure would require.
  • A large part of Uruguayan public works never passes through this record. Public-private partnership contracts, road trusts and works financed by Corporación Vial del Uruguay run on their own circuits. The seven large contracts that do appear here are what the procurement portal published, not the universe.
  • We do not measure the agreement's effect on employment, on informality in the sector, or on house prices. Those are legitimate questions and this corpus does not answer them. Anyone answering them with a figure should say which series it came from.
  • The agreement starts cutting hours on 30 August 2027. Everything said today about its effect is a projection. This piece measures the channel and its size, not the outcome.
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Sources

How to read this investigation

This is an analysis of public procurement data, which is public record. It documents verifiable facts — amounts, dates, suppliers, procurement method — and flags patterns worth scrutiny, keeping proven facts apart from open questions.

An exception purchase, a high price or supplier concentration is not, on its own, proof of wrongdoing. Many contracts may have valid administrative justification. The goal is to enable citizen oversight, not to issue a verdict.

Companies and people are named only as state suppliers, as they appear in the official system. Anyone named may add their response or correct a figure, and it will be incorporated.