An office worker clocks in at the start of his workday.
The debate on the reduction of the working day It is in the political orbit, but it is predestined to continue marking the work. It is there because it has not been present, at least in the terms that are now proposed, in the day to day of collective bargaining and industrial relations. It is not even a debate between companies and workers.
Since the late 70s we have reduced the effective working day to collective agreements. We are among those who have done it the most. So much so that, although We have a longer effective working day than Germany or Denmark, We have it lower than Sweden, Iceland, Italy, Portugal or Canada, below the OECD average.
Other articles by Josep Ginesta
Objectively, Reduction of working hours without reduction of salary will generate an impact on our economy. With greater or lesser intensity it will produce inflationary tension, loss of GDP, loss of jobs, fluctuations in productivity and loss of purchasing power of wages in the short term due to the increase in unit labour costs. This is predicted by the literature that has analyzed these impacts in other countries. In France in 1982, it produced a loss of occupation and in 2008 a increased labour turnoverThe reforms of the late 1990s in Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Slovenia did not create jobs. Some authors state that reducing the working week by 5 hours could lead to a 9% drop in productivity.
It is impossible to disagree with the proposal to work less and earn more. A different thing is how it is done, who pays for it, and how it is resolved. dead end of progress in a country with structural deficits. How do we deal with the increase in costs – up to 8.2% – and the need to fill vacancies? There will be sectors with obvious difficulties in filling vacancies, such as pharmacies or installers, which currently do not have enough professionals.
We also have to recover reality. We have the seventh highest minimum wage in Europe and we lead the living wage indicator in the proportion between this and the average salary. We have a progressive reduction in temporality. Have high absenteeism and a very high rate of sick leave (Catalonia leads the EU); and we have an unemployment rate as high as it is unreasonable for a developed country, leading the rates worldwide. In addition, we suffer from a scourge despite the reforms that have made us progress in labor rights: very low productivity. This string of “particularities” puts us before our mirror with an inefficient, ineffective and ineffective labour market.
The maximum legal working day in the EU is, for the most part, 40 hours a week, excluding Germany, which is 48How is it possible that with the longest working day they have the lowest effective number of working hours? And the answer is simple: They have let collective bargaining do its thing, sector by sector, area by area, in the agreement, consensus, transaction, maturity and shared progress (people and companies).
The challenge is how we reverse our reality, all of it. How we organize and improve working time, the time in which We should and could work better, gain efficiency and time to make our businesses and our personal history more viable in order to live better.
It would be expected from an orderly country that the debate about working and living better to redirect the political debate and the artificial pressures, focusing on better work and common sense. Strengthening collective bargaining, where, by the way, there is an opportunity because Spain leads the coverage rate worldwide. In fact, the countries that have done so have turned the effectiveness of their work into a synonym for less effective working time, and behind it all is the survival of companies and the happiness of people, and neither of them can be separated from each other. our progress as a society.
