After difficult negotiations, the Spanish government today gave the green light to reduce the working week from 40 hours to 37.5 hours, without at this stage having secured the majority needed for the bill to be approved by the Parliament.

“It is a historic day” because “for 41 years the legal length of the working week had not been changed in our country,” Labour Minister Yolanda Diaz, a member of the radical leftist Sumar party, said after the cabinet meeting ended.

“Reducing working hours will improve productivity in our country (…) It’s no use spending hours and hours at work, the point is that they are efficient,” insisted the minister, who is charged with implementing this flagship reform of the Spanish left.

The text approved today is the result of an agreement signed on December 20 with the two main unions, the UGT and the CCOO, but not with the employers’ organizations, which had decided in mid-November to withdraw from the negotiations after eleven months of fruitless meetings.

The latter are concerned about the impact of the reform on Spanish competitiveness. They argue that not all sectors of activity are affected the same and that a general reduction in working hours could weaken some firms.

A concern dismissed by Yolanda Diaz, who insisted on the stability of the Spanish economy, which recorded a growth rate of 3.2% last year. “We have more jobs than ever and more economic growth than ever,” she stressed, saying it was necessary for the country to “modernize.”

In their joint program sealed in October 2023, Sumar and the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) had pledged to reduce the working week from 40 to 37.5 hours by December 2025, with no loss of pay.

The reduction in working hours is expected to affect nearly 12 million private-sector employees, mostly workers in commerce, catering, or agriculture — the 37.5-hour workweek already applies to the public sector and large companies.

Beyond business, the main challenge for the government of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who lacks an absolute majority in the House of Representatives, is to convince its parliamentary partners of the solid basis for the reform.

The deal ratified today does indeed run into the reservations of the Basque nationalist PNV party, but mainly the Catalan separatists of the Junts per Catalunya (JxCat) party, two political formations that support the government but are known to be friendly to the business world.