The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has advanced that the conciliation law that the PP will present to Congress will opt for flexibility in the working day and, for this purpose, will include a bank of hours so that workers can choose how they will work and use them to reconcile.
The “populars” are finalizing this standard that they want to register soon in Parliament and which they want to present to social workers in order to obtain their opinion. In fact, Feijóo plans to begin this series of contacts with the UGT, CC.OO., CEOE and Cepyme in October.
One of the articles of the PP conciliation law will be the “flexibility” of the working day. This Tuesday, Feijóo already opened the door to a four-day working week in “certain sectors” if the same productivity is maintained.
According to the PP, Feijóo’s approach is conditional on the agreement between companies and workers, “no possibility of imposition by the government or any party“Moreover, this is linked to the sectors in which this is possible, add training sources.
In an interview with Vanity Fairwho collected Europe PressFeijóo already anticipates the possibility of being able to “work nine hours a day for four days a week” but adds that “for now” he prefers “talk about a bank of hours and that workers can choose how to use them for conciliation reasons, as well as a flexible working day“.
“The medium-term objective is to achieve a Spain in which, working four days a week, we can have the same productivity as other countries in the world, which will probably do so too,” he says.
In the electoral program that the PP presented for the general elections of July 23, it included a conciliation law aimed at “seeking flexible weekly working hours and time banks” to “respond to conciliation needs” and “unforeseen needs.”
Make schedules more flexible
While waiting to present its regulations, the first opposition party proposes to develop a bank of hours which would allow companies and workers to make their working hours more flexible according to their work-life balance needs.
In this way, the PP proposal is not limited to a fixed number of hours, as the government wants with its 37.5 hours per week, but rather the schedule is adapted according to the needs of the company and the staff, and there can be four-days because the employee has accumulated hours that can be used for rest.
The time bank would develop and improve the functioning of the current time control, which, according to party sources, currently has “very specific” controls that prevent flexibility and conciliation of employees.
The PP’s idea is to require companies to develop this flexibility with a prior agreement between unions and employers. A flexibility, party sources recall, which appears in article 34.2 of the Workers’ Statute: “By collective agreement or, failing that, by agreement between the company and the workers’ representatives, the irregular distribution of the day throughout the year” year, we read in the article.
The formation of Núñez Feijóo warns that Each sector has its own particularities and a generalized doctrine cannot be assumed for everyone.. For this reason, it is committed to a bank of hours that each company manages “surgically” and distributes its hours more easily.
This measure, in the opinion of the PP, will also serve to improve the productivity of the country, which for the “popular” is one of the most urgent problems of the labor market. According to the formation, by concentrating work on periods of greatest demand, it will contribute to reducing the number of hours worked at times when it is not necessary to work.
An example is a tax consultancy that has to work hard in the moments before its clients file their taxes, when they will likely be working more hours than usual. Under the PP’s proposal, the extra hours worked can then be used to rest in the following weeks or months, whichever is best for the worker and the company.
Work Paradigm Shift
And, from the PP, they argue that the work paradigm has changed and that people no longer live to work, but rather want to work to live and it is increasingly common that people who apply for a job are interested, in addition to the salary. , because of the conciliation conditions or teleworking for example. In this sense, the PP emphasizes that the conciliation of family and personal life has become an “unquestionable” social requirement.
To facilitate this new demand desired by the PP, the training offers compensatory measures for businessessuch as taking advantage of European funds or granting tax incentives if new unemployed people are hired to replace the rest of the workforce when they decide to take advantage of the hours they have accumulated.
But the PP stresses that the measure must be born from the consensus of social dialogue and therefore proposes a “comfortable” period that does not generate “anxiety” by reaching a hasty agreement, according to party sources.
