“A country that has its restaurants open at one in the morning is not reasonable.
"It's crazy to keep expanding hours until we don't know what time."
These words from the second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, have caused a stir in the last few hours.
Not only have the hospitality employers responded, but so has the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso: “Spain has the best nightlife in the world, with the streets full of life and freedom.
And that also provides employment.
They want us to be puritans, materialists, socialists, without soul, without electricity and without restaurants because they feel like it.”
And the person responsible for Labor has responded in return: “The president of the Community of Madrid seems to forget that, after ten at night, the days are nocturnal and, therefore, have certain risks.
“They have mental health risks.”
This exchange of statements occurs between political leaders of a country that, according to Eurostat, works as many hours as the European average but more than the most advanced countries, that works more at night than the average and whose working hours are much worse distributed. throughout the day.
This time anomaly of the Spanish is a vicious circle: it affects working hours;
the hours of shops, bars and restaurants;
the time at which schools start;
the times for lunch and dinner;
to sleep time (in Spain people sleep 20 minutes less on average than in European countries).
And the debate about whether these schedules should be modified comes to the fore from time to time.
However, they do not stop there, since all these issues are also on the agenda of the current Government.
Already in the last legislature Yolanda Díaz began to work on a time use law that she was unable to approve due to the electoral advance, but that she has incorporated again into the coalition agreement between the PSOE and Sumar.
To prepare this standard, Labor commissioned a report from more than 60 multidisciplinary experts who prepared an exhaustive document that included up to a hundred proposals, some also contributed by social partners, academics or public officials from different fields.
Among other issues, he recommends finishing work at 6:00 p.m.;
close shops earlier, between 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.;
advance the schedule of
prime time
television so that it ends at 11:00 p.m. (now it starts at 10:30 p.m.) or delay the start of school hours for secondary schools and universities.
The director and coordinator of this study, the political scientist and consultant Marta Junqué, explains that, as a result of this work, the Government's idea is to legislate in two phases: the first with the reduction of the working day also included in this study, from 40 to 37.5 hours per week;
and then “address a more balanced organization of working time, in line with what the International Labor Organization (ILO) requires, so that health, productivity and work-life balance are improved.”
However, the negotiation of this norm will necessarily have to be addressed within social dialogue, as the CC OO and UGT unions warned this Tuesday.
Worst distributed day
Spanish workdays are not compacted, they expand too much throughout the day.
Thus, between 8:00 a.m. and 8:10 a.m., 14.3% of Spaniards work or study, and between 8:00 p.m. and 8:10 p.m., 10.9%.
However, in Italy, although there are some more people working or studying early in the morning (20.2%), the gap is much smaller compared to Spain than in the late afternoon (4.3%).
That is to say, we get up a little less early but there are many more of us working until much later.
This panorama is repeated with respect to other countries, such as France (16.4% work in the morning and 4.1% in the afternoon).
Of the countries collected by Eurostat - whose figures are from 2010, but have comparative value - in no other State are there so many people working between 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.
This can be seen in the comparison with other European countries: we rest longer to eat and, above all, later, which ends up lengthening the day.
This circumstance took root during the Franco era due to how common it was to work in one company in the morning and in another in the afternoon.
The following graphs show the difference compared to Italy, another Mediterranean country but with more compact working hours.
They eat dinner earlier and also turn off the television earlier.
As the working day of so many employees is longer than in other European countries, many businesses close on weekdays at 9:00 p.m. and bars and restaurants close much later.
And when the employees of these businesses are lucky enough to have their days limited to 40 hours, it is common for them to work in split shifts, so that they expand even more throughout the day.
It is a channel that negatively affects the entire society, the same one that makes us eat dinner later than the rest of European countries and that places
prime time
television in the last hours of the day.
The origin, the factor that triggers the rest, is the work day.
The controversial case of trade
Making the time use law a reality will not be easy, fundamentally because another of the central reasons for understanding Spanish schedules is the productive fabric, in which services prevail.
This will involve, therefore, important and tough negotiations with employers and unions in the sectors that may be most affected by future changes.
This will probably be the case during business opening hours, where the thunder box has just been opened.
In general, opening hours have been extended in recent years throughout the European continent, but Spanish businesses lead the latest closures.
In Spain, in 2004 a minimum opening of 72 hours per week was changed to a minimum of 90 hours, increasing on holidays in areas with a large tourist influx.
In Germany, shops are open from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., with Sundays and holidays closed;
Even shops with extended hours close at 10:00 p.m. or 11:00 p.m. and are only open on Sunday afternoons and on no holidays.
The Belgian case is similar, with opening Monday to Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. or 7:00 p.m. and on Saturdays only until noon;
while in France, the hours are between 8:00-9:00 until 19:00-20:00;
and in Italy the business hours are from 9:00 to 12:30 in the morning and 15:30-16:00 until 19:30-20:00 in the afternoon (Afedeco, 2014).
In this sense, the experts to whom Díaz commissioned the preliminary work for the future law - whose Initiative for the Use of Time in Catalonia has just received the 6th
Edge of Government
Award , among a total of 13 public policy innovations proposed in the World Government Summit 2024 held in Dubai from February 12 to 14—make a very clear proposal: remove commerce and hospitality from the decree that regulates special work days and that allows workers in this sector to accumulate the day and a half of weekly rest provided for in the Workers' Statute to enjoy them later.
6.2% night workers
The greater volume of activities related to tourism in Spain, in which nighttime hours are inherent, has a decisive influence on this debate.
Eurostat data from 2019 indicates that in Spain 6.2% of employed people work at night, one point more than the European average.
It is well above our neighbors, Portugal and France, both around 3%.
There are countries with higher records, but for very different reasons than Spain.
15% of Slovakia, the country with the most night employees, is explained by the factories that never stop.
These industrial night shifts, better paid than the rest, continue to be an object of desire for many workers.
In any case, experts remember that in 2019 the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified night shift work in the group of “probable carcinogens for humans.”
The greater Spanish specialization with respect to services, rather than industry, also helps explain the differences in total working time.
Countries with shorter working hours are highly industrialized: this is the case of the Netherlands (33.2 hours per week), Germany (35.3) and Denmark (35.4).
In these countries, with salaries much higher than the continental average, these figures are also explained because voluntary part-time work is very common.
Only 2.7% of part-time employees in the Netherlands would prefer to work full-time, a situation in which 6.1% of part-time workers in Germany and 6.3% in Denmark find themselves.
Spain works as many hours on average (37.8) per week as the European average (37.5).
It is the third country with the highest volume of non-voluntary partiality, suffered by 50.8% of workers who are not employed full-time.
However, there are countries that work many more hours than Spain: this is the case of Poland (40.4), Greece (41) or Serbia (43.3).
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