Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s attempt to embrace proposals inspired by social democracy has come up against the limits of the hard wing of the PP represented by Isabel Díaz Ayuso. The Government of the Community of Madrid has shown itself this Wednesday to be “totally against” the proposal to concentrate the working day into four days and reduce the weekly hours proposed by Sumar, and which the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, partially agrees with because he has also proposed concentrating the working day into four days, although without reducing the hours. The PP will include this proposal in the Conciliation Law that it will present in a few days as the star measure of the beginning of the political year, and the Madrid Government accepts it if it is structured as a bank of hours that can be negotiated from company to company and that does not reduce the number of hours worked. But this rejection by the Ayuso Government to cut the 40-hour week, expressed by the government spokesperson this Wednesday, contrasts with Génova’s willingness to reform the current model. In the midst of negotiations between the Ministry of Labour and the unions and employers to reach 37.5 hours a week, Feijóo wanted to make the PP’s position more flexible and open to changes.
“The goal should be to work four days, but we have a productivity problem,” reflects the leader of the PP in an interview published this Wednesday in VanityFair. “Can we work four days for nine or ten hours? Artificial intelligence, robotics and technology can help us work four days a week, because the other three we are going to consume and give a lot of work to people in the leisure, travel, restaurant industry, etc.,” argues Feijóo, who when talking about nine or ten hours a day defends that the 40 hours that now appear in the Workers’ Statute should continue to be complied with, compared to the 37.5 hours proposed by Pedro Sánchez’s Government.
“The medium-term objective is to achieve a Spain in which, by working four days a week, we can have the same productivity as other countries in the world, which will probably also go that way,” insists the leader of the Popular Party, who wants to present an alternative government with social measures. Feijóo has also proposed this week an extension of paternity and maternity leave from 16 to 20 weeks and to allow both parents not to have to enjoy them at the same time.
The model proposed by the national leadership of the PP for the working day would leave the possibility of concentrating work in four days a week to collective bargaining, urging companies to allow greater flexibility in working hours, but without making three days of rest mandatory by law. The Popular Party does not propose a motu proprio reduction in working hours, currently 40 a week, but it is open to supporting in Congress the reduction to 37.5 hours that the Ministry of Labour is negotiating with social agents for 2026, provided that the employers’ association signs the agreement, which is currently still being discussed at the social dialogue table.
This approach clashes with that of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s government, as specified by the spokesperson for the regional government, Miguel Ángel García Martín, at the weekly press conference after the meeting of the governing council, in which he warned that the Community of Madrid rejects the reduction of the working day, he said, given that Spain “needs competitiveness and productivity” and “goes against” the self-employed and SMEs, which provide work for “more than 90%” of workers. “We, at this moment and as the regional government, are totally against what could be the reduction of a working day,” stressed Ayuso’s spokesperson. “When there is a more concrete proposal, we can see it,” he continued. And he concluded: “In a context like the current one, in which our country needs to improve its competitiveness, its productivity (…) with a productive fabric formed mainly by SMEs and self-employed workers (…) the first thing we have to do is think about them, think that our country is not an island, and that a measure such as reducing the working day is not going in the right direction.”
Asked about the PP leader’s proposal to concentrate the four-day work week by extending the number of hours worked to more than nine a day in certain sectors, the Madrid government spokesman said that he would evaluate it when the proposal is more concrete, although, he said, “in the current context”, they also reject the measure. Later, trying to avoid Madrid distancing itself from Feijóo’s position, sources from the regional government have qualified those words: “Another thing is how those hours are distributed and what the companies agree on regarding the organisation of their work days within the framework of their autonomy and safeguarding the productivity of the Spanish economy.”
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Other representatives of the hardline wing of the PP have also questioned Feijóo’s attempt to open up to social measures. The former president of the Community of Madrid, Esperanza Aguirre, has described as “a mistake” in a message on her social networks that the leader of the PP tries to capitalize on social banners of the left.
