The year 2025 will lead to a general policy of establishing shorter working weeks, bringing low costs for new hires for companies and an effective direction of change in labour relations.

With the aim of complying with the Spanish government agreement, the reform to shorten the working day to 37.5 hours a week has been negotiated with the social agents throughout the last year by the team of the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy of Yolanda Díaz. As a result of the unwillingness to reach an agreement with the representatives of the businessmen, the agreement with the CCOO and UGT was presented before Christmas, together with the articulated legal text that must now be approved by the Council of Ministers and Congress.

The policy of shortening the working day has been included in the public debate and the social agenda in recent years. Spain is one of the few European countries that is undergoing a change of direction in Labour Relations, such as with the constant increase of the minimum wage, the reduction of the temporary nature of the hiring model and, now, the political and social agreement to shorten the working day.

In this way, working time has regained a centrality that should never have been lost, as it is an effective way to counteract the natural tendency of capitalism to increase the level of exploitation, uniting the demands of both the workers’ struggle and the feminist and ecological movement. In defense of a social model of working less and living better, a fair distribution of the income and jobs necessary for life is essential, and shortening the working day is also the most direct and economical policy to support it.

There have been no significant improvements in the field of working time in recent decades, but we rely on some precedents to continue pushing this claim into the present. During the crisis of the 1990s, the struggle to shorten the working day kept alive the possibility of facing production crises and job losses from an inclusive and innovative perspective. In France, the Aubry law, which established a maximum working day of 35 hours, is the main reference in this line of policy, showing that it was highly effective, although the follow-up after it was neutralized by the political right based on the productivist "work more, earn more".

In recent years, the pilot experiences of the 4-day work week have been successful examples. Starting in the Anglo-Saxon villages, a pilot of this type in the Valencian Community was also launched by Compromise. However, as a result of the agreement with Más País, it was promoted by the Ministry of Industry in Spain and also by the leftist government in Portugal, creating multiple opportunities to deepen the debate to shorten the working day.

The current impetus of the policy of shortening the working day has been significantly influenced by the fact that the UGT proposed 4 days or 32 hours per week, being the union that has deepened the struggle for time in labor relations the most. However, the CNT, CGT and LAB have also defended this claim before, with the program of transition to a 30-hour work week. Unidas Podemos paved the way with Nacho Álvarez’s proposal to shorten the maximum legal working week to 34 hours, without pay restrictions, and the Sumar coalition, with a 32-hour orientation, managed to enter the government program to shorten the excessive legal day to 37.5 hours per week during 2025.

Shortening the maximum legal working time to 37.5 hours per week

In the coalition government agreement negotiated by Nacho Alvarez, head of negotiations for the coalition between Podemos and Sumar with María Jesús Montero of the PSOE, it was agreed to develop a policy to shorten the legal working day: "We will shorten the maximum legal working day, without pay restrictions, to set it at 37 and a half hours a week. It will be implemented gradually and will be reduced to 38.5 hours in 2024 and completed in 2025. From there, a table will be set up with the social partners to evaluate the results of the reduction and to continue shortening the legal working day, taking into account the characteristics of the sectors of activity, the evolution of productivity and the economic context". The agreement also agreed that: "We will adopt a law on the use of time, in agreement with all the agents of society, which will allow us to move towards a more balanced organization of time between women and men, promoting the well-being of people and the efficiency of the network of companies and associations."

Although in the previous legislature the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy published a comprehensive roadmap coordinated by Marta Junque, the current political debate has been limited to applying a shortening to 37.5 hours of work per week, together with two complementary measures: on the one hand, the obligation of a digital record of the working day that will be available for the representation of workers, and on the other, the undeniable right to comply with the disconnection outside the working day.

After tough negotiations with employers in 2024, Vice President and Minister Díaz has rejected the progressive two-phase implementation of the agreement signed with the CCOO and UGT unions, which would limit job creation. We will look at these impacts in light of the exaggerated calculations of some public and private anti-reform organizations.

As explained in an article published in Hordago, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of Spain, BBVA, Fedea and Cepym’s assertion that shortening the working week to 37.5 hours will result in enormous labor costs and job creation is not fair, nor would it diminish the competitiveness of companies. In such a case, unemployment would be significantly reduced and would also have a multiplier effect, but experience has shown that this is not the intended effect. The response of companies to shorten working hours in market economies will be to reduce excess production capacity and reorganise work.

As estimated in the article published in the journal Labor Relations, in the case of the generalization of the 37.5 hour work week, the expected effects on employment and labor costs are heterogeneous, and there are several challenges for labor relations in the application of the measure: customer service schedules, subcontracting of other small or autonomous companies outside the original companies, the use of informal employment without contract, opportunities for internal flexibility in exchange for shortening the working day, the increase in tasks and objectives that are not related to the concrete presence, and the impact on seasonal jobs, to name a few.

The low-cost reform is the generalization of the 37.5 hour working day

CEOE and Cepym have resigned from a global agreement to offset costs. For this agreement, the Ministry offered to finance the first recruitment of small businesses and support to increase their unconditional productivity in order to create employment. As a result, it will be necessary to undertake the amendments of the Congressional procedure or collective bargaining in the branch in order to obtain specific commitments. But how many new jobs are we talking about if we generalize the 37.5 hour workweek?

The published article estimates that moving to 37.5 hours in the private sector as a whole could lead to job creation between 122,000 and 198,000, with net labour costs for companies ranging from 4,200 to 6,800 million euros, much lower than those announced by organizations opposed to the general application of the shortening of working hours and limited to the sectors mentioned.

The employer’s demand was to make it more flexible and expand the possibility of working overtime while shortening the working day, but Díaz refused because he already has too many. In order to shorten the working day, and not to make it more flexible, it is necessary to start a rigorous debate on the expected impacts and costs, which will be the main obstacle to achieving the 37.5 hour week of general application this year.

The shortening of the legal working day should also be an opportunity to open other debates that will allow us to deepen a global program of transformation of the socio-economic model. To this end, it is necessary to collaborate with mechanisms to prioritize the application of daily hours, to facilitate the distribution of care work proclaimed by the feminist economy, or, as ecologists usually point out, to reduce displacement by reducing working days.

Beyond that, incentives should be provided to make the application of shorter working hours more generous up to 35 or 32 hours per week, and compensation funds should be reserved for companies or sectors that would agree on a more comprehensive reform. If there are already days of 37.5 hours or less per week in large industrial enterprises and public employment, the challenge is to generalise shorter working hours for all wage earners.

The shortening of the working day, which will take place in the coming months, will not only make time for many citizens to live, but will also lead to an increase in the salary of almost a quarter of the women salaried in part-time jobs, since both the day and the percentage of the salary will automatically increase in relation to those who work full-time.

In order to meet the government program's goal of "continuing to shorten the legal working day," we should now dig deeper into the direction of moving to 32 hours a week, analyzing the consequences of this profound measure. As estimated in the above-mentioned article, it would lead to higher job creation, ranging from 816,000 to 934,000 new jobs, and would reduce the unemployment rate by 3.4 to 3.9 percentage points. The net labour cost to companies would be between EUR 22 billion and EUR 26 billion, but as a result of the new taxes and contributions paid, as well as subsidies for the unemployed and the saved, the budgetary return to the public institutions would be almost 60% of the new salaries paid, generating new public resources to finance the reform.

Mikel Alvarez ‘Betelu’, Veronica Castrillon, Roser Espelt, Jon Bernat Zubiri, members of the Labour Economy Working Group