The Ministry of Labor and Social Economy will resume negotiations on Tuesday, September 24, with CCOO, UGT, CEOE and Cepyme to reduce the weekly working day from the current 40 hours to 37.5 hours without a pay cut. The second vice-president and head of the branch, Yolanda Díaz, postponed this appointment to test the Catalan employers’ associations Foment and Pimec, linked to Junts and Esquerra Republicana respectively, who are visiting Barcelona at Díaz’s initiative. The labor movement has presented various projects to reduce working hours and has tried to obtain the support of employers after giving them an ultimatum, without showing any interest in any of them. Díaz is blocking the negotiations and questioning one of his major reforms.
Díaz was supported in Catalonia by her Secretary of State for Employment, Joaquín Pérez Rey. He met with the president of the Catalan employers’ association Foment, Josep Sánchez-Llibre, his namesake of the SMEs, Anoni Cañete (Pimec) and other representatives of the Catalan business sector, in addition to meeting with the unions and the ‘ president Salvador Illa. The employers’ organizations, far from taking a step forward, maintain their refusal. In the case of Foment del Treball, which is part of the CEOE, it maintains its position aligned with the employers’ association at the national level.
Coinciding with the meeting of the table and in the face of the deadlock in the negotiations, the general secretaries of the CCOO and the UGT, respectively Unai Sordo and Pepe Álvarez, will mobilize workers in front of the CEOE headquarters on September 26 in a protest campaign that has a double objective: to denounce the businessmen and to put pressure on Yolanda Díaz to submit the law to the Congress of Deputies without the consensus of the CEOE.
The ministry has promised to send its latest proposal in writing, but has not finished defining the elements of flexibility to apply the reduction in working time beyond January 1, 2026, nor how it will assess the impact on the sectors furthest from the weekly target. , nor the bonuses for SMEs that leave gaps in their application. The CEOE awaits the Labor initiative and in any case maintains its position. initial position of organic reduction of the working day through collective agreements signed by businessmen and unions.
The negotiations have been at a standstill since they began. The government intervened in bilateral negotiations between employers and unions when no progress had been made. An ultimatum and several vague proposals later, every summer, the negotiation is at the same point and leaves Yolanda Díaz in a bad position.
The Galician faces more obstacles than expected, as observed by the failure of the subsidy reform that was finally articulated according to the criteria of Unidas Podemos. The ambitious reforms of the working day (so far failed) and the causes of dismissal will determine the future of the Galician at the head of a labor portfolio with little fruitful legislative activity. But he now finds himself in a difficult situation, with businessmen very little interested in accepting him and unions doubling down on the pressure for legislation in Congress… where support is not at all assured.
