A new device to gradually generalize the four-day week in Spain? The government launched this Friday a pilot program intended to help SMEs in the industrial sector to reduce the weekly working time of their employees without lowering their wages. Objective: boost productivity.
This project, published in the official journal, will be tested for two years in companies wishing to test organizational reforms likely to “generate an increase in productivity which compensates for the additional salary costs”, indicated the Ministry of Industry in a press release. Interested companies will have to commit to reducing the weekly working time of their employees by at least 10% over a period of two years. This measure will have to affect at least 25% of their employees, specifies the ministry.
The 4-day week already adopted by some Spanish companies
In return, they will receive state aid, intended to compensate for the impact caused by the reduction in working time on their production, but also the additional costs created by the establishment of this new organization, adds the press release. The objective is to analyze the effect of eventually having a number of companies with “sufficient statistical representativeness” to analyze the effect of this measure on productivity, before possibly “extending it to the rest economy,” he insists.
In recent years, several large companies have already tested or even adopted the four-day week in Spain, such as the telecoms giant Telefonica or the ready-to-wear group Desigual, but rarely in the industrial sector and often with a salary cut.
Despite these multiple initiatives, the four-day week remains a sensitive subject in the country: the unions are largely in favor of it, but the main employers’ organization (CEOE) is opposed to it, judging it inapplicable in many sectors of activity.