Sumar brings an initiative on this matter to Congress this Tuesday in what will be the first parliamentary vote on the measure
MADRID, 18 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Ministry of Labor has called again for this Monday to unions and employers to continue advancing in the Government’s objective of reducing the weekly working day to 38.5 hours in 2024 and to 37.5 hours by 2025 without loss of wages.
The meeting, which will take place at 4:30 p.m. and will be chaired by the Secretary of State for Labor, Joaquín Pérez Rey, is the second held by the social dialogue table for the reduction of the working day after the one held on January 25 and in which CCOO, UGT, CEOE and Cepyme asked to negotiate this matter among themselves, in parallel to the tripartite meetings with the Government.
The Ministry of Labor accepted the demand of the social agents and then indicated that it would convene them in the coming weeks to see what progress they had made in their bipartite negotiations.
Negotiators from unions and employers have already started these negotiations and are exploring whether the reduction in working hours can be agreed on an annual basis because that is how it is usually included in collective agreements.
Both CCOO and UGT trust that they will be able to reach an agreement with CEOE and Cepyme that can be brought to dialogue with the Government for its regulatory transfer.
In this sense, the general secretary of UGT, Pepe Álvarez, has asked the employers not to show the same “intransigence” to agree to the reduction of the working day to 37.5 hours that they had, in his opinion, during the last negotiation for the increase in the Minimum Interprofessional Wage (SMI).
“I want to make an appeal so that we can close an agreement and that the issue of reducing working time is not a burden for companies,” the union leader said a few days ago.
Also the general secretary of CCOO, Unai Sordo, hopes to bring closer positions with the CEOE and has asked “not to assume” that the employers will slam the door on this negotiation. “It’s not going to be easy, but we have to give it a chance because I believe that an agreement is not impossible,” he has defended in recent weeks.
For their union, “it is an inexcusable demand that during this term the working day be reduced by law”, as the Government has promised.
For CCOO and UGT, although the objective of reducing the working day to 38.5 hours for this year has already been practically met, a legal reduction in working time is necessary to continue promoting an effective reduction of it through collective bargaining.
“The reduction of working hours is not going to have a single format, this is not just about reducing the weekly working day or working four days. This goes in multiple ways, where sometimes the working day will be reduced on an annual basis, other times it will be worked four days, but other times that will not be the model, but rather it will be a reduction in the daily working day,” the unions explained.
In any case, although there is confidence in an agreement, the second vice president and Minister of Labor and Social Economy, Yolanda Díaz, has made it clear on several occasions that the reduction in the working day, contemplated in the Government agreement between PSOE and Sumar , it will be done even if it does not have the support of the business organizations CEOE and Cepyme.
The agreement between PSOE and Sumar contemplates reducing the working day from the current 40 hours per week to 37.5 hours by 2025 without salary reduction. In between, the idea is that in 2024 the working day will be cut to 38.5 hours.
The vice president believes that Spain must reduce the working day, which has been frozen for “40 years,” so that workers gain time for life. She defends that it is a measure highly supported by citizens, even by right-wing voters, and that it will improve the productivity of the Spanish economy.
From the Ministry of Labor, Pérez Rey has made it clear that the final result of this negotiation will be the one that comes out of the tripartite table, respecting “the commitment” that the coalition government assumed in its program. According to Labor, the reduction of the working day to 37.5 hours will benefit more than 12 million workers.
Labor has incorporated into the social dialogue table the modification of the time record so that it is more effective and so that the reduction in working time “can be enjoyed by workers without there being any type of element or restriction or fraud.”
The Ministry also considers that the sanctions regarding working time contemplated in the Law on Infractions and Sanctions of the Social Order (LISOS) “are not sufficiently dissuasive to avoid non-compliant behavior”, so tightening them is also part of the objective of this reform of the government.
Precisely, Sumar’s parliamentary group will defend in the plenary session of Congress next week an initiative to reduce working hours without loss of salary, in which it will be the first parliamentary vote on this measure promised by the coalition government, which does not have the approval of all the investiture partners.
The initiative will be debated in the plenary session next Tuesday, so that the parliamentary groups will have to establish a position on an issue that at the time generated discrepancies between PSOE and Sumar and that was finally included in the Government agreement.
The proposal that will be brought to the Plenary Session, to which Europa Press has had access, urges the Government to open “urgently” a process of social dialogue that will culminate in the modification of the Workers’ Statute, as well as the pertinent provisions, to incorporate a progressive reduction in the working day, starting by setting a limit of 38.5 effective hours in 2024.
This is the second initiative that Sumar has registered in Congress on this matter in just over two months and the one that will be taken to the Plenary Session is less demanding than the one presented in December 2023, when the Government was urged to undertake the reduction, without appealing to social dialogue, and setting a limit of 37.5 hours per week, opening the door to an agreement with social agents to lower it to 32 hours.
