The debate over working hours reduction in Spain has travelled, in little more than two years, from peripheral ideological position to a government bill. This journey, from the four-day week proposal by minister Alberto Garzón in 2021 to the government's proposal of a 37.5-hour maximum working week, illustrates how a discussion that initially seemed confined to academia and progressive movements has become a central variable in Spanish business management.
Current law. The 37.5-hour week is a government proposal (proyecto de ley) that has not been approved, so it is not in force. The legal maximum is still 40 hours a week of effective work averaged over the year (Artículo 34.1 ET), and collective agreements or employment contracts may set fewer hours. This article analyses the debate around the proposal.
The Case For: Productivity, Health, and Talent Attraction
Advocates of working time reduction build their argument around three main pillars, each supported by empirical evidence and concrete business rationale.
Productivity and the long-hours paradox. There is a documented, if non-linear, relationship between working hours and declining marginal productivity per hour worked. Stanford economist John Pencavel estimated that productivity begins to decline measurably beyond 49 hours per week. Spain’s “presenteeism” culture — the widespread practice of remaining at work beyond what is necessary due to cultural pressure — generates inefficiency and makes objective performance measurement harder. A results-oriented model rather than a presence-oriented one, which is what any well-managed working time reduction implicitly requires, tends to improve the quality of output.
Health and absenteeism. Long working hours are associated with higher prevalence of cardiovascular disease, sleep disorders, anxiety, and burnout. Each sick leave absence has a direct cost for the employer: in Spain, companies bear the cost of sick pay from day four to day fifteen of any leave. Reducing chronic absenteeism linked to exhaustion therefore has a direct financial return for employers, though precise quantification requires company-specific data.
Talent attraction and retention. In tight labour markets — technology, engineering, finance, consulting — schedule flexibility and shorter working weeks have become genuine differentiators in attracting qualified profiles. An Adecco survey in 2023 found that 74% of Spanish workers would prefer a four-day week even if it meant longer daily hours. For companies with high turnover and significant replacement costs per vacancy, reduced working time can be an investment with a measurable positive return.
The Case Against: Costs, Operations, and Sectoral Competitiveness
Spain’s organised employer associations — CEOE and Cepyme — have maintained firm resistance to mandatory working time reduction, grounded in three core arguments.
Labour cost increases. A reduction in working hours without a corresponding reduction in salary is equivalent to an increase in the cost per hour worked. For companies with thin margins or labour-intensive activities, this increase may be unabsorbable without passing it through to final prices or offsetting it with productivity improvements that in many cases are not immediate.
Operational problems in continuous-coverage sectors. Hospitality, private healthcare, transport, distribution, and much of manufacturing require physical presence at hours that cannot be compressed. Reducing the mandatory maximum working day in these sectors without sufficient flexibilisation mechanisms may simply mean more workers for the same output volume, with the attendant cost increase.
Competitive divergence from the European environment. The argument that Spain puts itself at a competitive disadvantage relative to countries with longer working hours merits qualification: Germany works fewer average hours than Spain according to OECD statistics, with notably higher productivity per hour worked. However, Spain’s structural productivity gap relative to Germany will not be resolved by a working time reduction alone; it requires investment in capital, training, and management process improvement.
International Experiments: What Can Be Learned
The Icelandic experiment (2015-2019) is the most cited: 2,500 public sector workers reduced their week from 40 to 35-36 hours with maintained pay. Results showed productivity held steady or improved in most workplaces, and worker wellbeing increased in a statistically significant way. Iceland is, however, a small country with highly specific institutional and cultural characteristics.
The New Zealand government pilot (2020-2021) and Belgium’s approach — where since 2022 workers can request to compress their week into four days without reducing total hours — offer an alternative model: not a reduction in total hours but concentration into four working days. This avoids the cost debate while preserving the benefits associated with an additional day off.
Spain’s Position in the European Context
Spain has a 40-hour maximum working week (Artículo 34.1 ET), broadly in line with the European average. Countries including France (35 hours), Denmark (37 hours), and the Netherlands (36.4 average effective hours) already sat below that threshold. The proposed reduction to 37.5 hours would bring Spain closer to the European effective average, though it would remain above Nordic models.
What distinguishes the Spanish debate from elsewhere in Europe is the intensity of the employer-union conflict and the significant gap between the legal maximum and the hours actually worked in many sectors, where the informal extension of working time beyond contracted hours is an entrenched phenomenon. The proposal addresses the formal maximum; tackling the informal extension is a question of workplace culture that legislation alone cannot resolve.
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