A 4-day work week, the new bet of E …

Several shops of Spain they started to apply a 4 day work week, while it is still debated whether this year will begin to govern this measure at the national level. If the reduction of one working day is implemented, Spain will become the first European country to take this initiative.

After the rigid lockdown applied last year in Spain, the owners of a small restaurant chain in Madrid recently offered daughter Danae De Vries to cut one day out of her work week while keeping the same salary.

“It’s wonderful, because it gives me time to work, to see family, to see friends, to have time to study,” says De Vries, 28, who is studying to become a theater teacher. “It’s wonderful to have the time, not to rush, to be able to have this inner peace,” he adds.

Her boss, María Álvarez, was forced to make various changes to her two restaurants, including offering a four-day rotating work week. Álvarez is a mother of two babies and together with her partner they have struggled to keep the business going without receiving any childcare help.

“We felt that society had turned its back on families, that we had been betrayed. As business leaders, we had to find solutions for our companies, our employees and also for our personal life ”, explains Álvarez.

The idea of ​​bringing the four-day working week to the national level is still being debated in Spain. One of the projects is owned by the progressive More Country party and is a three-year pilot plan that will use $ 59 million from the European Union’s coronavirus recovery fund to offset around 200 midsize companies with the target make adjustments to their workforce and reorganize work processes to accommodate a 32-hour work week.

These funds will be used to subsidize any additional costs to employers during the first year of testing and will subsequently reduce government assistance to 50% and 25% each consecutive year.

Héctor Tejero, legislator belonging to Más País to the regional assembly of Madrid, specifies that the only condition is that the readjustment leads to a real net reduction in working hours while maintaining the wages determined in the full-time contracts.

“The idea is not that European funds pay, that the Spaniards work less. The idea is that EU funds are used to approve measures that can increase the competitiveness and productivity of companies, which they want, ”said Tejero.

The case for the measure has benefits for the economy in general, as a three-day weekend could generate higher consumption, especially in entertainment and tourism, pillars of the Spanish economy.

According to a study published this year by the Cambridge Journal of Economics, reducing working time from 40 to 35 hours per week in 2017 would have resulted in GDP growth of 1.5% and 560,000 new jobs. In turn, wages also rose at the national level by 3.7%, which particularly benefited women, who seek part-time work the most.

Software Delsol, located in southern Spain, invested 400,000 euros last year in reducing the working hours of its 190 employees and reported that since then it has had a 28% reduction in absenteeism, because people choose to go to the bank or doctor visits on weekdays off. In addition, its sales increased by 20% last year and none of its employees have resigned since the adoption of the new work plan.

However, critical sectors of the initiative say that an economy affected by the pandemic is not the best case scenario for this type of experience. With a contraction of 10.8% of GDP last year, the worst since the civil war of the 1930s, Spain has suffered intermittent closures and the near total halt of international travel.

Some experts say the priority should be to solve the country’s dysfunctional labor market, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe and which has been affected by precarious and low-wage jobs.