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WORKING IN SPAIN

Spain set to slash work week to 37.5 hours

Spanish Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz has said her ministry will soon reduce the working week by two and a half hours, a decision which will improve the work-life balance of 12 million employees across the country.

Published: 23 January 2024 10:56 CET
Spain set to slash work week to 37.5 hours
Spain's Minister of Labour and Social Economy Yolanda Díaz is spearheading the reduction of the week in the country. (Photo by JAVIER SORIANO / AFP)

Spanish Second Deputy Prime Minister and Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz has committed herself to introducing a reduction of the work week from 40 hours to 37.5 hours as a means of improving the work-life balance of Spain’s workforce and increasing productivity.

The head of hard-left Sumar intends to achieve this by reaching an agreement with Spanish work unions UGT and CCOO, while excluding Spain’s business associations from the negotiating table. 

“We are going to carry out a reduction in the working day to 37.5 hours per week without any salary reduction,” Díaz stressed on Monday.

“We’re going to try to reach an agreement, which I would like to be three ways; but if it cannot be, it will be two ways, but we’re going to get it done,” she stated about her intention to approve the new work week hours without the green light from business group CEOE. 

PSOE and Sumar, the two left-wing parties which form Spain’s new governing coalition, had the work week reduction as one of the key promises of their legislative pact, but Díaz had already proposed the idea when she headed the Labour Ministry during the previous government.

Two in every three Spaniards support the move, according to a survey by the 40db Institute conducted for El País and Cadena Ser. 

The 40-hour full-time work week was first brought into law in Spain in 1983.

A reduction of two and a half hours a week would equate to 30 minutes a day, in essence leaving work half an hour early.

The deal between PSOE and Sumar would see the progressive drop in weekly work hours be of 1.5 hours in 2024 (38.5 hours) and of 2.5 hours in 2025.

READ ALSO: What are my rights if I work extra hours in Spain?

According to Díaz’s estimates, 12 million contract workers in Spain’s private sector will benefit from the decision, by “improving the compatibility of work with other uses of time such as caring for loved ones, further education, leisure or socialising”. 

“There is sufficient technology, production models have changed,” Díaz argued.

Reacting to Díaz’s words, the president of Spain’s business association CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, said that “no one is saying that working hours cannot be reduced” but “not all sectors are the same, that’s why what we propose is that it be done sector by sector , at each negotiating table, which is how it has always been done”.

Earlier in January, Spain’s labour minister reached an agreement with the country’s unions to raise the minimum wage in 2024 by €54 per month over 14 payments, a measure which was also contested by business associations. 

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DIGITAL NOMADS IN SPAIN

Cafés in Spain on war footing against remote workers hogging space

Bars and cafés in Valencia, Santiago and Barcelona have started to take action against lingering remote workers and digital nomads by cutting off the Wi-Fi during peak hours, with some even banning remote working on their premises.

Published: 10 May 2024 11:02 CEST
Cafés in Spain on war footing against remote workers hogging space

Increasingly in recent years, a trend has emerged: someone arrives in a café, orders a coffee, opens his or her laptop and then spends the whole day working without buying anything else.

For many digital nomads and remote workers, it seems spending a couple of euros on a coffee is a fair price for occupying a table for an entire morning or afternoon.

Some might say they are contributing to the local economy and supporting local businesses, but clearly, for a small business owner this isn’t a profitable arrangement, and many are now fighting back.

In Valencia, posters have appeared at some cafés banning remote working during peak hours: 8.30 to 12.30.

One Valencia café owner told La Vanguardia: “Our place is small and between 10 and 11.30 in the morning it’s impossible, we need all the tables.”

Raquel Llanes, boss at the Departure Café in the Raval area of Barcelona, explained to Barcelona Secreta that the situation has gotten out of control: “We’ve had customers who have ordered an espresso and sat for eight hours, people who have asked us to turn the music down so they could have meetings, customers who took out their Tupperware to eat… At first we adapted the space with sockets and to work, but after two years we realised that the numbers weren’t working out.”

Some have opted for less friendly, but equally effective methods: turning off the Wi-Fi network of the premises during peak hours.

“The owner has got rid of the Wi-Fi to avoid precisely these situations. People sat down and didn’t leave,” one waitress told La Vanguardia.

Similar sentiments have arisen in the Galician city of Santiago, where one café owner told La Voz de Galicia: “We prefer them not to come. If someone comes in and opens a laptop we don’t tell them anything, but if they’ve been there for a long time and we need space for a group, we ask them to please move”. 

When a remote worker in Valencia posted a negative comment about a café where the owner had asked him to leave, their reply went viral, as they stated “we can’t lose regular customers so that you can work”. 

Remote working (teletrabajo in Spanish) has exploded in popularity in Spain in recent years, particularly in the post-pandemic period, and often the people taking advantage of this flexibility are foreign digital nomads and remote workers. Many of them choose to work from local bars and cafés.

It should be said that not all people working remotely in Spain are foreigners. Many Spaniards also have flexible or remote working arrangements and will no doubt occasionally work in a local bar or café. Equally, many digital nomads take advantage of the abundance of ‘co-working’ spaces popping up around Spain, which are exactly for this purpose.

There are even café owners who promote the ‘work friendly’ environment as a means of establishing a loyal customer base.

Other hospitality businesses have preferred to allocate an area for remote working while keeping the bar area and certain tables for regular customers who stop by for a quick bite or coffee. 

READ ALSO: The best co-working spaces for digital nomads in Spain

The row over remote working in traditional Spanish bars and cafés is yet another chapter in the current debate over the influence mass tourism and gentrification is having on Spaniards’ standard of living. 

In the increasingly online, post-pandemic world, the change has been stark in some parts of Spain. Take a stroll through the Raval or L’Eixample neighbourhoods of Barcelona, or the Ruzafa and El Cabanyal areas of Valencia in 2024, and you’re likely to see buildings plastered in Airbnb lockboxes and possibly even hear more fluent, non-native English than you do Spanish in certain parts.

Tourists and wealthy remote workers, the logic goes, visit or move to a trendy city they’ve seen on an international ranking, say Málaga or Valencia, which causes rents to rise because landlords in the area convert their properties into short-term tourist rental accommodation to meet the growing demand, which in turn turfs out locals or shuts down local businesses. 

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