Employees will have to wait until well into 2025 before their maximum legal hours – the limit after which working hours are considered overtime – drops from the current 40 hours per week on an annual basis. And that is as long as the maneuver goes well. in the extremesa few days before the end of the year, from the vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, and the union leaders of the Workers’ Commissions (CCOO), Unai Sordo, and the General Union of Workers (UGT). The ministry and the centers to reduce the working day to 37.5 hours without salary reduction. According to the text, which requires the approval of Congress and will likely undergo modifications during parliamentary processing, all companies should apply it before December 31, 2025. In sectors with longer working hours this is expected “like water in May,” he points out. Jesús Lillo, a veteran in the hotel sector at 50 years old. But there is also skepticism after months of negotiations that have ended with the withdrawal of the employers’ association and with a text that currently does not have guaranteed parliamentary support.
Although the maximum legal working day has not changed in Spain in four decades, collective bargaining has achieved reductions depending on the sector or company. That is, employers and unions have agreed on ordinary working hours lower than the maximum in various collective agreements. This is reflected by statistics from the Ministry of Labor, which places the weekly average at 38.3 hours by 2023. In that sense, all sectors have agreed average working hours below 40 hours. Such is the case of (39.9 hours), followed by hospitality and information and communication, both with 39.3 hours.
The second of them belongs to Lillo, who has been working in a hotel in the Barrio de Las Letras, in Madrid, for almost a decade and a half. With an intensity of 40 hours a week, he covers the night shift and earns a monthly salary of 1,900 euros. “I see the reduction as very favorable; I want to have more time to share with my family,” he says. And as a UGT union representative in the hotel chain where he works, he emphasizes that this is not just his wish: “Every day my co-workers ask me if I know how the negotiations are progressing,” he emphasizes. However, he admits “many doubts” about the success of the measure. “When political interests get involved, with the experience I have, I don’t have the feeling that I will succeed.” And then there are the practical issues, because although he would like nothing more than to implement the reduction of working hours, he remembers that for better and for worse “hotels never sleep.”
The modification promoted by the minority partner of the coalition government not only aspires to a reduction of two and a half hours per week, but also to toughen sanctions on companies that violate this measure, to expand the regulation of the right to digital disconnection and to guarantee that the way in which companies record workers’ daily hours is reliable, traceable and accessible.
Sebastián Marcano Salazar, a 22-year-old Venezuelan worker, agrees with this last proposal. “If you are forced to reduce your working hours, you must keep stricter records.” Marcano is studying waiter and service management, and works 40 hours a week in a bar near Atocha. His schedule, he says, changes according to the needs of the premises, which further complicates an already precarious balance: that of work and training. That is why the young man recognizes that working fewer hours would enhance the well-being of employees, and believes that, personally, “it would help me provide better quality service to clients.”
The measure “has impact” in the commerce sector
It is no coincidence that sectors with longer agreed working hours are also characterized by having precarious working conditions, with unpredictable hours spread throughout the day and lower salaries. , to the three sectors mentioned above are added two more that exceed 39 hours per week on average: agriculture and commerce.
Beatriz A., 45 years old, knows the latter well. She has spent almost half her life as a store manager and asks not to give her last name so as not to be identified. He assures that the news of the reduction in working hours “has had an impact” in the sector, but he has doubts about its materialization: “In the world of retail [comercio] Partial contracts predominate because there is a lot of work during some periods such as Black Friday, but also totally dead periods,” he describes.
His contract is for 40 hours a week without overtime, but he reports that part-time workers usually work, on average, 30% more than what was agreed: “There is a lot of extension and a general deregulation of schedules. It is difficult to balance work with personal life.” However, despite skepticism, he assures that given the hardness of some tasks, the reduction of the working day brings hope of not ending the days with so much fatigue: “It is a physical job, there is a lot of handling of merchandise,” he explains.
For the group of workers with part-time contracts, the agreement signed by Labor and the unions also provides for improvements. These employees will have the right to continue working the same hours that they were working before the law comes into force and, therefore, their percentage of effective time worked will be greater over 37.5 hours than over 40 hours. Therefore, they will be entitled to a proportional increase in their salary if the legal change goes ahead as planned.
“The field has no schedule”
If in hospitality or commerce shortening working time is seen as difficult, in agriculture it is perceived as something impossible, as highlighted by the secretary of COAG (Coordinator of Farmers and Livestock Organizations) in Castilla-La-Mancha, Andrés Gálvez. “Honestly, there are no expectations regarding the reduction of hours in the primary sector. Although the law establishes it, we cannot work 6 or 8 hours a day, because livestock and crops are our requirement,” says this producer born 72 years ago in Carrascosa de Henares (Guadalajara).
For Salamancan farmer José Manuel Cortés, 54, an added obstacle is that the majority of workers in the sector are self-employed, which is why they will not benefit from the reduction in working hours. Cortés estimates that he spends more than 2,800 hours behind the wheel of his tractor each year, to which are added 300 hours of machine maintenance. This gives an average of 54 hours per week, 16.5 hours more than the maximum working day that the Ministry of Labor and the main unions want to set.
The pact to reform the Workers’ Statute includes a commitment from the Government to “” within a period of 18 months. These include work in the fields or at sea, but also transportation, commerce, hospitality or other activities that are frequently carried out in shifts, with split days or at night. Of course, the limit of 37.5 hours would continue to be sacred, even though for many of those affected by the longer days it is seen as an unattainable goal.
The pending processing
Whether it arouses enthusiasm or distrust, many workers are also aware that the document agreed upon this week has a long and hard road ahead before it comes into force. Labor plans for the reform to be processed urgently through a bill, which would accelerate the usual deadlines. But that will not prevent it from having to be evaluated by the Economic and Social Council, and then go to the Council of Ministers, which will send it to Parliament. The most optimistic calculations suggest that it could take between two and three months before it lands in the Council of Ministers. And then they would wait three more months for its processing in the Cortes, due to its weakness in the support to carry out different regulations.
During this process, it is common for modifications to be introduced in the text by the different parliamentary groups, in exchange for their favorable vote. And some changes could alter substantial issues, both in content and application deadlines. If this legislature is demonstrating anything, it is that aligning all political forces with the current correlation of forces in Congress and the Senate is not an easy task. And precisely the need to obtain support to approve this cut was the argument of the Minister of Economy, Carlos Body, that the application of the reduction and delay its validity from 2026 onwards.
The employers’ association is the great absentee in the pact. It closed the doors to negotiation despite the incentives that Labor put on the table to reduce the impact of the measure on SMEs, such as the contribution bonus for new contracts that compensate for the reduction in working time or direct aid worth 300 million euros for the digitization of time registration, among others. Although this aid could now be recovered during the parliamentary process as a bargaining chip to achieve the support of some groups such as the PNV or Junts.
Thus, the political ups and downs and the rigidity of some sectors undermine the confidence of many employees in change. The original plans of the coalition government, whose pact includes a commitment to reducing the working day, were to reduce this to 38.5 hours in 2024 to reach the promised 37.5 hours in 2025. But a whole year of negotiations has passed with the employers’ association and it was not until December, when it was already abundantly clear that adding businessmen was impossible. That is why Marcano, the 22-year-old Venezuelan waiter, sees “too many challenges” for the measure to be effective. In a sector that he describes as “ultra old-fashioned,” he acknowledges that he sometimes works many more hours than his contract indicates, without changes in the 1,350 per month he receives. The initiative could be great news for him, but day-to-day life has made him resistant to enthusiasm: “I find it very difficult for this to be implemented letter by letter,” he summarizes.
