Díaz will launch a new proposal on Monday to reduce the working day, in the midst of escalating tensions with the employers
The Ministry of Labor will present to employers next Monday a new offer to reduce the maximum legal working day from the current 40 hours to 37.5 hours in 2025. A new twist that occurs in the midst of escalating tensions and cross-accusations between Yolanda Díaz’s department and the employers over a measure that the employers’ associations reject and estimate could cost them 42.4 billion euros. On the other hand, the Labour Department maintains that the reduction in working hours will increase productivity and facilitate a better use of time.
“The Labor team is going to make a new proposal, no longer to the unions, but to the employers. Let’s see what your negotiating vocation isthe Second Vice President and Minister of Labour said at the press conference following the Council of Ministers on Tuesday. Díaz did not go into detail about the content of this new text, which she will announce at the meeting on Monday.
But he did emphasise again how far apart the positions of the two parties are. “The Government is not going to reduce working hours fake“Díaz has said, who has completely rejected the employers’ proposal to accept a reduction in working hours to 37.5 hours in exchange for extending the legal limit of annual overtime hours from the current 80 to 150. “That is a reduced working day fake“It’s not going to happen, we’re not going to do it,” he concluded.
The growing tension between the Labour and employers following the reduction in the maximum legal working day that the Government is finalising has once again escalated, with a new exchange of statements.This is the first time we have encountered an employers’ association that does not make proposals.who speaks in the media about the fall of the Government, but who is oblivious to social dialogue,” Díaz criticized.
“I would like there to be institutional respect and for what needs to be said to be said on the 4th floor of the Ministry of Labour”Díaz said, referring to the place where labour laws are negotiated with unions and employers. Díaz has insisted again that she will seek an agreement on a measure that is “the one that Spaniards value most and most desire, whoever they vote for”, that “improves the productivity of companies” and that she wants to deploy in a country with a “very long” working day that has not been touched since 1983.
Garamendi criticises ultimatums: “We are not being listened to”
The vice president’s words came just a few hours after CEOE president Antonio Garamendi once again criticised the attitude of the Ministry of Labour in the negotiations. “We have raised many issues at the table and no one listens to us at all, they give us ultimatums”Garamendi has complained, who has defended these days that the employers’ proposals have been raised orally at the tables throughout the negotiation.
The leader of the business community has criticised the words spoken on Monday by the Secretary of State for Labour, Joaquín Pérez Rey, in which he described the attitude of the employers’ association at the negotiating table as “mockery”. “We have the freedom to say that we don’t like it, that’s not a mockery“It seems that you can only be a good person if you say what they like,” Garamendi said at a breakfast briefing held on Tuesday.
Unlikely agreement
The new proposal that the Labour Party will bring to the negotiating table next Monday has little chance of success due to the distance between the positions of the two parties. Employers reject any reduction in working hours that is not agreed upon in collective agreements. A point that the department headed by Díaz and the unions reject outright, precisely because one of the things that is sought with the reduction in hours is that it reaches those sectors and employees who are still working 40 hours a week or close to it.
Besides, Neither UGT nor CCOO and Labour seem willing to exchange a reduction in working hours for an increase in the number of overtime hours. that can be done legally every year. The proposal that the employers’ association has put forward to compensate for the economic loss that companies would suffer from reducing the legal working day.
Cepyme —the business association of SMEs in the orbit of CEOE— published a report on Monday in which it estimated that 42.4 billion euros is the cost of reducing the working day to 37.5 hours by 2025. A maximalist and implausible calculation that assumes that for every hour reduced, an equivalent amount of added value would be lost and that companies would not hire workers to cover the loss of working hours. Two factors that are difficult to achieve simultaneously in this way.
