Spain cuts working hours. The week of 37.5 hours is underway

After a year of delicate negotiations, The Spanish government gave the green light to reducing the working week from 40 to 37.5 hours, Even if at the moment there is no guarantee that the bill passes into Parliament. “It is a historical day because the legal duration of the working week has not been changed in our country for 41 years,” said Labor Minister Yolanda Diaz, a member of the far -left party Sumar. “Reduce The working day will improve the productivity of our country. It makes no sense to spend hours and hours at work, we must be efficient “, underlined the minister, in charge of guiding this Spanish left -wing left -wing -left reform.

The text adopted is the result of an agreement signed on December 20 with the two main workers unions, UGT and CCOO, but without the organizations of employers who in mid -November had decided to abandon the negotiation table after eleven months of meetings unsuccessful. The employer confederations are in fact worried For the impact of the reform on Spanish competitiveness, they believe that not all sectors are on the same level and that indeed a general reduction in working hours can weaken some companies. But the minister replied that Spain now has more jobs and that it is now necessary to “modernize” the country.

In the agreement signed in October 2023, the Sumar and the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) were committed to reduce the legal working week from 40 to 37.5 hours by 31 December 2025, without any loss of salary. This reduction will affect almost 12 million employees in the private sector, especially in the retail, catering and agriculture sectors as the 37.5 -hour working week already applies to public service and large companies.

In addition to the entrepreneurial community, the main challenge for Pedro Sànchez’s government, who has no absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies, is to convince his parliamentary partners of the reform merits. In fact, the agreement collided with the perplexities of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and, above all, of the Catalan group Pro-Independence Junts for Catalunya (JXCAT), two allied formations of the government but considered close to the entrepreneurial community.