Spain’s idiosyncratic and gruelling working day, an 11-hour stretch punctuated by coffee breaks, yawns and long lunches, could be abandoned as the government seeks to bring the country into line with the rest of Europe.
On Monday, the employment minister, Fátima Báñez, announced a push to let Spaniards knock off at 6pm, rather than the current 8pm. The government has also said it is willing to consider, as part of a series of measures designed to improve work-life balance, reversing the Franco-era decision that put Spain in the wrong time zone.
“We want our workdays to finish at six o’clock and to achieve this we will work towards striking a deal with representatives from both companies and trade unions,” she told parliament.
“Someone’s got to take the first step and that’s why I’m asking for the support of the biggest companies and the trade unions.”
At the moment, Spanish workers start their day around 9am, break for coffee mid-morning and then work until 2pm. The lunch break lasts two or three hours, after which they return to work until about 8pm. Such a late finish means that dinner isn’t eaten before 9pm. After a couple of hours of TV, people tend to go to bed around midnight.
Proponents of change argue that a working day built more around agricultural labour than the office-based reality of most of 21st-century Spain has taken too large a toll on people and productivity for too long.
It is not the first time that calls have been made for a thorough overhaul of the working day. Three years ago, a parliamentary commission recommended the introduction of a more regular, 9-to-5 day.
The commission also suggested returning the country to its proper time zone. Although Spain used to be on the same time as the UK and Portugal, it has run an hour ahead since 1942, when General Francisco Franco shifted it forward in solidarity with Hitler’s Germany.
“We call it the religious working day: you start work when God wants and finish when he wants,” said Professor Nuria Chinchilla, director of the International Centre for Work and Family at Spain’s IESE Business School.
Chinchilla said the negative consequences of a tired workforce extended far beyond the balance sheet.
“It’s awful and it affects people’s ability to look after their children and spend time with them after school; we’re also sleeping an hour less than we should be, so we’re less productive given the hours worked and there are more accidents. It’s really irrational and that’s why we’re campaigning for it to be fixed.”
She said turning back the clocks and introducing a 9-to-5 day would yield swift and obvious benefits: “If we turn the clocks back, it’ll get darker earlier and so people will want to go home earlier. It would also be good for the body and people would work better and more productively.”
Details of the government’s plan are unclear, but the People’s party, which was returned to office in October after 10 months of political paralysis, has already won the support of the opposition Socialist and the smaller Ciudadanos (Citizens) party.
The move comes a year after the Catalan government committed itself to becoming the first region in Spain to align its working hours with the rest of Europe.
Catalonia’s new working day, designed to improve work-life balance, is expected to begin in September 2018.
In October, campaigners in the Balearic islands urged Madrid to let them stay on summer time rather than putting the clocks back along with the rest of Spain. They pointed out that the Balearics see the sunset almost an hour earlier than western parts of the peninsula and that businesses and people suffer as a result.
The Més per Menorca coalition said that keeping the islands on the same time as mainland Spain was based on “obsolete industrial” concerns, adding: “Modern society needs the hours of daylight to adapt to its leisure time.”
