Next Monday, the Popular Party plans to register its conciliation bill in Congress. This is the biggest legislative gamble of the Popular Party at the beginning of its second year of legislature. And according to sources from the party, Alberto Nuñez FeijooThe standard will include, among other measures, the four-day week as one of the options to implement “greater time flexibility.”
This is, as this newspaper has learned, to facilitate “flexible working relationships.” To this end, the popular warn that “there will be no taxation on companies,” as the government of Pedro Sanchezin his opinion. “It is a question of deepening the measures which help with conciliation” with the double objective, in the short term, of “making life easier for citizens” and, in the long term, “make it easier for everyone who wants to have children.”
For the working class, Spain is not only faced with problems of precariousness and the cost of living, which “They make it impossible” for families to make ends meet, “or even to find them” due to the inability to access housing (to buy or rent) and stable employment. And also to a “demographic winter” that will make the welfare state “unsustainable” “if we do not invest in young people and families.”
The standard is based on three principles, according to sources familiar with its content: make life easier for workers as a guiding principle of all its articles, reduce stiffness labour market regulation to stimulate economic activity and commit to higher productivity.
Feijóo himself mentioned the first aspect in a television interview. In it, the popular leader announced that his party’s bill provides to relax and “extend” paternity and maternity leave up to 20 weeks, which can be freely divided between the parents.
On the one hand, it is about ensuring that it is not women who have to take longer off work out of necessity, “involve” men too. And on the other hand, to first contemplate all the types of families that are being formed today.
A week ago, the PP announced that the same law would include free nursery schools from 0 to 3 years old throughout the country: “Families are the ones who know how to organize their home best, so the PP is not going to interfere.” in the way they distribute mothers’ and fathers’ leave: they will have freedom to use them during the baby’s first year,” the popular leader said.
For the PP, “being a father or mother cannot be heroic” and, as Feijóo said to his leaders, Spain should “roll out the red carpet for those who have the courage to bring a person into the world”and his party are facilitating it, through this proposed law, which aims to be the “the most ambitious of democracies”.
Already in his speech before the National Executive Committee of the PP, this Monday, Feijóo had He plans to meet with employers and unions to involve them in his initiative.
The PP started the course by trying to “legislating in Congress” on “a government in decline”. And in addition to working for new laws that “make life easier,” “force PNV and Junts” choose “between supporting Sánchez or developing the policies that his voters want.”
Productive and competitive
But in addition, the law aims to enter into labor relations, with changes that not only affect today’s workers, directly, but also the improvement of the Spanish economy, looking to the future. “In recent years, Spain has diverged from its EU partners in terms of productivity… and not being competitive is impoverishing yourself“.
According to data managed by the Popular Party, Spanish GDP per capita is 17 points lower than the Eurozone averageThis is 10 points more than before the financial crisis of 2008: before the global catastrophe, between 1995 and 2007, the pace was completely the opposite, and the distance between Spain and the European countries surrounding it went from 20% to just seven points.
“We will enter the conciliation debate without any preconceptions,” explains an official PP source. “During the second week of October, once the PL has been presented, We have called employers and unions to discuss improvements, such as flexible hours.
The four-day weeka concept that until now has only been defended by a part of the left, is no longer taboo for the PP. “We are not in a closed group”“But everything depends on the contribution of social agents,” emphasizes this spokesperson. Because it is only by facilitating economic activity, “with certain predictable, stable and agreed laws “Among all,” the popular people emphasize, wealth is generated.
According to Feijóo, increasingly low wages are a consequence of the relative impoverishment of the population. Spanish economy “heavily indebted” not for innovative investments or in training, but “to finance subsidies and fees that discourage work.”
To reverse this trend, the PP will propose greater legal security for companies, with guarantees of legislative work and stability. stable hiring incentives.
But the key, which is at the center of the policies of this legal text, is the workers. So much so employees and self-employed workers.
“The increasing precariousness and rigidities of employment in Spain are linked to the “A government that does not care about its citizens,” the sources say. “And both unions and employers are eager to be heard to face together the real problems of the Spanish economy, not only in the short term, but also in the long term.
