The Popular Party has fully entered into the debate on reducing working hours with a proposal which aims to mark the distances with the government’s project to reduce the legal maximum to 37.5 hours per week, but which arouses enormous doubts in the economic and commercial world due to its impact on productivity and ‘job. Alberto Nuñez Feijóo defends that “compacting” the weekly working day into four days, working “between 9 and 10 hours” would have no impact on labor costs and productivity and would be limited to certain sectors only. » But, even if this were the case, the simple fact of raising it in A reform of the Workers’ Status opens the door to an earthquake in the organization of working time with unpredictable effects.
The idea never appeared in the PP’s electoral program. Now, Núñez Feijóo wants to present it to unions and employers throughout this month. The general secretary of CCOO, Unai Sordo He has already stated that he does not share the lines of the proposal, but he appreciates that the first opposition party “enters this game”. The employers’ association, whose president Antonio Garamendi He denied last week having any knowledge of the plans of the president of the PP, marks the distances and claims its “independence” in the complex struggle it has been waging for months with the government and the unions.
The PP submitted to Congress on Tuesday a conciliation law which speaks of “the development of flexible working hours and the creation of banks of hours that workers can use according to their needs”, but explicitly not of the working day of four days. Training sources affirm that the “possibility of an agreement” between the worker and the company to concentrate 40 hours of work in 4 days would not be “like an imposition” or “something generalized”.
But even with these nuances it is not saved the main obstacle contained in the words of Núñez Feijóo: put back on the table a debate considered dead. Union activists have been explaining for some time that current legislation now allows companies and their workers to agree on weekly working hours “compacted” into four days distribute the 40 hours over 10 hours per day, but also, if there is an agreement, reduce the weekly total to 32 hours without proportional salary reduction.
In fact, in Spain there have been cases of small companies that claim to apply the last option, the most attractive for workers, and of political groups like More countries (today included in Sumar) defended this idea during the last legislature.
At this point, it should be remembered that these companies have particular characteristics (including some startups that seek publicity with these ads) which move them away from the average. It’s when they don’t apply a ‘false four day day‘, in which the fifth teleworks from home or recovers in another way.
Despite this, those of Íñigo Errejón managed to uproot the PSOE a pilot project to study the implementation of this four-day, eight-hour week, subsidizing businesses with the costs linked to paying the same salary for reduced working time. Electoral development has thwarted the development of the program, although the truth is that corporate applications for membership they did not even reach 30% of the reserved budget.
How we rely on elEconomista.esit was precisely the fiasco of this project that gave Díaz the courage to agree with Pedro Sánchez on a commitment from Parliament to reduce the legal limit of the working day from 40 to 37.5 hours per week without reduce salaries, but also without entering into agreements at any time on how it would be distributed per day. A controversial plan whose application has been the subject of negotiations for almost a year with employers and unions, although they were not initially expected.
Therefore, in the field of business, it was surprising that when the debate I’m clearly going in another direction.the PP takes up the banner of the four days, even if it is with a different approach from that of Más País. The idea outlined by Núñez Feijóo appears to be directly inspired by Keir Starmer’s UK Labor government’s plan to concentrate weekly working day at the same hours without reduction in salary.
With this, there will be no increase in labor costs as is the case with the government plan, which, according to all economic analyzes on the matter, companies would have a direct impact on prices and would slow down economic growth. An analysis by Fedea and BBVA Research estimates that imposing the reduction from 40 to 37.5 days would result in a reduction in job creation equivalent to 700,000 jobs over the next five years and subtract 2.6 percentage points from expected GDP growth. Of course, these calculations were based on a more conservative postulate than that of the Executive itself: The reduction in working hours would reach 8 million employees compared to the 12 estimated by the Ministry of Labor led by Yolanda Díaz.
Who wants to work ten hours a day?
It is difficult to reproduce the same exercise with the PP plan due to the lack of specificity. Its scope has not been detailed either in number of workers or in time horizon. In addition, the “popular” insists on the fact that it would be subject to agreement between companies and workers and linked to an improvement in productivity. But this flexibility is already enshrined in labor legislation and from the moment we talk about one less working day, we are committing an “error”. not so different from that engaged with the coalition government: aim to guide bilateral negotiations in the agreements of political power.
Concentrating the 40-day week on four days instead of five would mean working an average of 10 hours per day. But in his statements, Núñez Feijóoo avoided closing this figure. and varies between 10 and 9 hours per day, or 36 hours per week. The divergence, close sources explain, is due to the fact that most agreements agree to a working week of less than 40 hours per week.
According to the latest data, 93% of workers subject to collective agreements plan to work below this limit, 38% below 38.5 hours and 10.9% below 37.5 hours. These same agreements affect 89%, 29.4% and 2.4% of companies respectively.
This is the argument put forward Yolanda Diaz and the unions to defend the reduction of the legal limit. Even if the fact is that no sector speaks in its agreement of a four-day week. The reason is simple: most businesses cannot afford to close three days a week nor can they afford to hire staff. to fill gaps in supplying a worker for a full daywhich would increase labor costs.
For his part, Although the idea of flexibility may seem attractive to some workers, most prefer to do it occasionally and not continuously: in many jobs, work four days in a row working 10 hours a day This can be more exhausting than doing it eight at a time. And these long hours carry some risk to the worker’s health.
At this point, the idea of the PP also seems to move away from another of the keys to open negotiation on the working day: the increase in the annual ceiling for overtime and the remuneration of unpaid hours. In this scenario, the PP recommends measures to reduce absenteeism, in particular by strengthening the control of sick leave, although the formula for doing this has not been specified.
