A woman holds a tampon in her hands.getty
Girona City Council workers will have a bag of eight hours per month to be absent from their job due to discomfort derived from menstruation. This is a measure of flexible hours, since public employees will have to make up the hours spent in a maximum period of three months. The proposal was approved last week unanimously at the General Negotiation Table of the City Council and will have to be ratified by the plenary session to be held in June. The deputy mayor and councilor for the Treasury and Interior Regime of the City Council, Mª Àngels Planas, celebrates that Girona is a pioneer in Spain in a measure that will allow "reconciling the right to health and well-being at work."They have promoted the leave - which will not entail sick leave or spend vacation days - a group of workers in agreement with the majority union in the City Council, Intersindical.
"If you feel unwell in the morning, you can start two hours later or leave in the middle of the morning if that is when you have symptoms," explains Planas, who points out that menstruation "is not a disease, but an indisposition of a certain moment." "Until now the workers had to take days off or vacations," explains the secretary of Feminism of Intersindical in the Girona region, Zaida Vidal, who states that the initial request was that the leave was 16 hours. Planas explains that the City Council estimated the maximum time that the inconvenience of the rule can last at eight hours. Vidal values the agreement "very positively", which will modify the City Council's collective agreement, on an issue that "historically has been highly stigmatized and very taboo." It highlights that, when the workers made the request,the union sought information on similar measures and only found precedents in Italy and Japan.
"It can be reviewed to get more hours, paid leave and extend it to menopause"
The deputy mayor sees menstrual leave, a measure that will be applied to civil servants and temporary women, as a way to show that the Consistory, governed by Junts per Catalunya, and ERC, is "sensitive to women's rights." Vidal believes that the menstrual leave, which must be approved in the ordinary plenary session on June 14 to take effect immediately, puts a debate on the table to extend the measure to other municipalities and companies. "It can be reviewed to get more hours, paid leave and extend it to menopause," he says, while waiting for it to end up becoming an "acquired right." Upon its approval, the Feminism secretary is confident that the measure will go ahead, due to the diverse representation that is already in the General Negotiation Table.
In a statement, Intersindical stated that "it does not want in any way to further stigmatize women or cover diseases related to menstruation such as dysmenorrhea and endometriosis." He pointed out that "the rule does not have to be painful, but it can cause specific annoyances and it is in reference to these that the permit focuses."