Pérez Rey is confident that tomorrow’s meeting with unions and employers will be “fruitful” and will already yield results
September 8 () –
The Ministry of Labour and Social Economy will meet this Monday with CCOO, UGT, CEOE and Cepyme from 10.30 am to continue negotiating the reduction of the weekly working day to 37.5 hours, according to sources from the Department headed by Yolanda Díaz confirmed to Europa Press.
This will be the first meeting of this social dialogue table after the summer holidays and, according to what the Secretary of State for Employment, Joaquín Pérez Rey, said this week, there will be new proposals from the Government.
The last time a meeting of this committee took place was on July 29. Pérez Rey praised the “constructive” tone of the meeting, in which the employers’ associations committed to “seriously” studying the proposal made by the Ministry to apply the reduction in working hours in a flexible manner throughout 2025, improve the registration of working hours and guarantee the right of workers to digital disconnection.
Within this flexibility offered to employers so that the reduction of the working day to 37.5 hours comes into effect in 2025 and not on January 1, the Ministry of Labour argues that most collective agreements will lose validity between 2024 and 2025.
“Therefore, it is clear that during these two years, the sufficient flexibility that we are going to incorporate in the reduction of working hours will also allow for a claim by the employers themselves. That the collective agreements can now be negotiated with the new conditions and there will be no impact on those that are in force,” said Pérez Rey after the last meeting.
According to the Ministry of Labour, no judge or court has held in recent years that a collective agreement has to be revised because there has been a change in labour legislation. “But even that argument does not have much weight because most collective agreements will lose their validity between 2024 and 2025, which is exactly when we are going to carry out the reduction in working hours,” said the Secretary of State.
The Ministry wants to agree to this reduction of working hours to 37.5 hours per week as soon as possible and considers that it has offered employers sufficient margins for this reduction to be made progressively without significantly altering the pace of the companies.
“We are clear about our commitment to Spanish citizens, which is to reduce the working day to 37 and a half hours and establish sufficient flexibility for what will be a regulation that will last almost a generation, because this regulation has to be implemented gradually,” said Pérez Rey.
In this context, the Ministry of Labour also aims to improve time recording in order to verify whether the working day is legally complied with.
RIGHT TO DISCONNECTION
At the last meeting of the committee, the Ministry launched a specific proposal to guarantee the right to digital disconnection both in face-to-face work modalities and in teleworking. The aim is to avoid reprisals against those workers who do not pick up the phone outside of their working hours and do not read emails when they are outside of working hours.
The Secretary of State made it clear that no worker will be able to suffer “even the slightest negative consequence” as a result of exercising the right to disconnect.
“We are going to speed things up so that in September we can reach an agreement to reduce working hours as soon as possible and then the Government has a good chance of moving quickly with the regulatory process so that we can meet the deadlines of the Government agreement,” he added.
TRUST THAT IT WILL BE A “FRUITFUL” MEETING
The Secretary of State is confident that Monday’s meeting will be “fruitful” and will already offer “some results” because, although there is no strict deadline, we cannot wait much longer to implement this measure, as promised by the coalition government.
“There is a commitment in the government agreement that calls on all of us, employers’ unions and the government itself, to implement this reduction as soon as possible,” he argued last Tuesday, during the press conference to present the unemployment figures for August.
Regarding the protests announced by CCOO and UGT to promote the implementation of the reduction of the working week to 37.5 hours, Pérez Rey expressed his “utmost respect” for the “legitimate demands” of the trade union organisations and their freedom of association.
“I hope that these mobilizations will not be necessary and that we will reach an agreement at the social dialogue table as soon as possible so that no mobilization will be necessary,” he said.
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