The second Vice President and Minister of labor, Yolanda Díaz, has announced that the Council of Ministers next Tuesday, April 29, will approve in the second round the bill to reduce the working day at 37 and a half hours a week, thus remitting the legislation to the Congress of Deputies for their parliamentary processing.
In the closure of the CCOO Industry Congress held in Toledo, the head of Labor has sustained that the draft already has “all reports” prior mandatory, so “next Tuesday it is definitively approved in the Council of Ministers and we will continue working on the negotiation with all the political forces,” added Yolanda Díaz.
The rule, the result of an agreement between work and the majority unions, CCOO and UGT, from which the employer was picked up, will be approved two days before the first of May, International Labor Day, when the workers of workers had announced that they would urge the Government to send the law to Parliament.
In search of parliamentary support
The legislation in question aims to take the working day of the current 40 hours, approved in 1983, until 37 and a half hours a week. In addition, the norm regulates important changes to strengthen time control, which seeks to hinder abuses such as overtime not paid, and also specifies some issues of the right to digital disconnection.
The bill now faces its final exam: the search for support in Parliament to reach the Official State Gazette (BOE). This path will not be easy, in a very complex political context to assemble majorities in Congress, and with the employer against, pressing so that the norm does not come forward. All eyes point to Junts, the only investiture partner who has expressed that, for the moment, the government does not have its support for this regulation and with a lot of relationship with the business world.
These difficulties have delayed until the date that the coalition government brought to Parliament the regulation, a delay that has also increased due to the irruption of the tariff war of Donald Trump, which has focused the government’s performance in recent weeks.
However, at the doors of the big day of the labor movement, and with a very tensioning scenario on the left due to the increase in defense spending, the progressive coalition government will finally approve the law to reduce the working day in the Council of Ministers, one of the star promises of the legislature, especially to add, and which has broad support from the citizenship, according to all surveys.
