Yolanda Díaz defends the need to legally reduce working hours establish a “minimum floor” that extends to all sectors, after employerargued this week that this is a “collective agreement-specific issue” and that changing it by law represents interference in collective bargaining. An argument that the second vice-president of the government categorically rejected, affirming that “the debate on the law on collective bargaining is not real”.
This was stated on Thursday during an event of the workers’ committees, during which the Minister of Labor also spoke about the rejection of CEOE and CEPYME to his proposal to reduce the maximum legal working day from 40 hours per week to 37.5 hours in 2025.
“Spanish employers take a step backrewinds and tells us that through collective bargaining and not through law”, said Díaz, who defended that the Constitution empowers public authorities to limit working time and that in this case “the the presence of the law is entirely appropriate, adequate, necessary. »
In this sense, he argued that the legal reduction of the working day is “a complementary measure to collective bargaining“After”40 years of frost of the reduction of the working day”, in which it “failed to translate the productivity improvements of recent years into a generalized reduction of the working day”.
Thus, he assured that the Government is “very favorable to collective bargaining”, but also to “a minimum floorbecause for 40 years of collective bargaining We continue practically the same day “To reach places where the working day has not been reduced and for the law to function as a minimum floor, we need to amend Article 34 [del Estatuto de los Trabajadores] and operate there,” he insisted.
The leader of the Labor Party thus insisted on the fact that the speech used by the employers “is not real”, but “a excuse why you don’t want to take one of the most necessary steps today for occupational health, to improve productivity, to improve the lives of workers in our country” and also “the health of businesses”.
“The debate over collective bargaining law is not real“, he affirmed, insisting on the fact that “For this minimum floor, we need the law“, in addition to collective bargaining. Even if some companies already have shorter working hours, he added, “what we are going to do now is tell the Spanish men and women that we are going to generalize and that There will be no first class workers and no second class workers.“.
