The runaway inflation over the last two years has meant that collective bargaining has focused until now on the revaluation of salaries. Something that, as a collateral effect, has circumvented another of the great labor demands: the reduction of working hours. But 2024 may bring a turning point. Once part of the purchasing power has been recovered –although slight–, the union centers and the Government also want to focus on the schedules.
Steps such as that of Telefónica and Mercadona and the agreement between the PSOE and Sumar will serve as an asset, according to the unions, to try to negotiate a reduction that the employers do not see clearly given the reduced productivity of the Spanish economy. The moderation of the CPI and wage increases will be key to pushing towards a reduction in working hours, CC.OO agree. and UGT. During 2021 and 2022, the increase in salaries was below inflation, with a loss of purchasing power of eight points. This 2023, however, the remuneration increases will be greater. The average salary variation of the 3,385 agreements signed until November is 3.49%, while inflation that month was 3.2% – the advance CPI for December places it at 3.1%.
If the trend continues, as the more than a thousand agreements signed to date and applicable next year seem to indicate, “it is time to open the folder,” consider the workers’ representatives. “Companies that have not already reduced their working hours below 40 hours per week are going to have to prepare for these parameters,” says Mari Cruz Vicente, confederal secretary of Trade Union Action of CC.OO.
For Fernando Luján, deputy general secretary of union politics at UGT, the cases of Telefónica and Mercadona will represent a before and after and will have an undoubted “drag effect” on the world of work. The telecommunications company has agreed within the framework of its ERE negotiations to reduce the working day from 37.5 to 36 hours per week over a period of three years, very close to the 35 hours proposed by the PSOE and Sumar throughout of the legislature.
As for Mercadona, the largest private employer in Spain with 100,000 workers, it has committed in its new agreement to reduce working hours in 2025. Currently the full day at Mercadona is set at 40 hours per week. A reduction in the distribution leader will mark the step in a sector where schedules and work on weekends are often a cause for complaint.
Another of the hot spots that is opening up is in the first state agreement for the textile sector, which the unions negotiate with the ARTE employers’ association, where large companies such as Inditex, Mango, H
The employers warn, however, of the difficulty of applying a general reduction. “We will see if the proposal contained in the Government agreement bears fruit or not in a law, but in any case a measure of this type cannot be implemented in a uniform and homogeneous manner in all sectors, apart from the fact that it must be raised within the negotiation collective”, emphasizes Javier Ibars, director of Labor Relations and Social Affairs at Foment del Treball. The general secretary of Pimec, Josep Ginesta, considers that the working day “will be a matter to be dealt with from company to company, and not on a sectoral basis due to its difficulty.” All this, he warns, if the moderation of inflation is confirmed next year.
