If the negotiations for reduce working hours was in an impasse, the unions demonstrating in front of the employers’ headquarters and the CEOE meeting with the Junts to reverse the measure during the parliamentary process, the PP proposal concerning conciliation and working time has made the question even more confusing. Thus, to the discussion on the number of hours to work per week is added the number of days over which these hours are distributed.
Among the various points of legislative reform that the People’s Party presented to the Congress of Deputies are time flexibility and the creation of a “bank of hours”. In both cases, these are initiatives which allow a less strict organization of work, even if At no time is the reduction of working hours discussed. as proposed by the Government. However, this opens the door to the four-day work week.
And that’s when the waters mix. The position defended by the Executive, as well as by the unions, is to go from 40 hours per week to 37.5 hours. In your case, the problem is focused on the number of hours workedof course leaving their organization to collective negotiation. The idea is that workers without a deal or in sectors where unions have little leverage can also benefit from reduced hours, as is already the case in many sectors.
However, the four-day work week was already the subject of public debate. Largely because it was introduced by the government itself, as well as the unions. For this reason, the emergence of PP In a conflict that had been avoided since the start of the legislature, this idea disrupted conversations between the Ministry of Labor, unions and employers.
But what exactly are the people at Núñez Feijóo offering? The proposed reform aims to ensure that companies implement flexible hoursallowing employees to choose the start and end time of their working day, although a fixed period will be set during which they must work.
Europe Press
In the document registered in Congress, the PP specifies that this model will facilitate the “flexible distribution of working time throughout the day or week”. And he explains that the agreement for this must be established between the company and the worker representatives, guaranteeing at all times that “working hours and salaries are not reduced”.
They therefore propose not to modify the maximum working time and to leave the arrangement of working time to the discretion of collective bargaining. That’s to say, they are proposing exactly something that is already happeningsince current legislation allows collective agreements to establish four-day days or a more flexible distribution of time. Likewise, they make it possible to reduce the maximum working time in the event of agreement between workers and the company.
Something similar happens with the proposition of bank of hourswhich would allow workersaccumulate additional working hoursovertime or unused paid leave. » These hours can be used to “extend vacation,” “take additional days off,” or “reduce your work hours at certain times.” All this on the condition that an agreement is reached. .
“We positively appreciate the fact that they have ideas and participate in the debate on reducing working hours”, underline the unions, while recalling that “the concept of bank of hours is already established, it is already used”. This is one of the articles which aroused some surprise: “they have now understood that it exists”, they comment. But, in any case, they agree that the organization of time must be done within the framework of collective negotiations.
And the unions’ demand is not about organization, but about quantity. “Companies and workers will continue to distribute the day as before, but we want that the reduction of working hours is a global reality“, they say.
But on the employers’ side, we see a better disposition towards the initiative of the conservatives. This is not surprising, since the CEOE has been repeating for months that, for it, the reduction of working hours is a question of collective bargaining at the company or sector level. And the reform of the PP, precisely, leaves everything in the hands of this body.
This is why the arrival of the popular people to the debate – they have already announced that They wish to present their proposal to the different stakeholders— extends the government’s approach to reducing the working day. Already in the third quarter, the promise to set the working day at 38.5 hours per week in 2024 completely vanished.
