Any takers? Spain wants volunteers to trial four-day work week
- Some 200 firms are expected to sign up for the three-year programme, which is due to start in autumn
- Mas Pais, a left-wing political party, has been pushing for a four-day work week for years, but says the pandemic has now made the initiative more plausible
Spain is about to ask hundreds of companies to join in one of the biggest-ever tests of whether a four-day work week can be implemented without harming the economy.
While initiatives elsewhere have largely been small-scale and started by individual businesses, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s administration has agreed to put €50 million (US$59 million) of public money into a three-year, nationwide programme.
It is the brainchild of a small, left-wing political party called Mas Pais, which persuaded the Socialist-led government to implement a 32-hour work week and then assess the experiment. Party leader Inigo Errejon, expects around 200 employers to sign up voluntarily, with a start date in autumn.
“A hundred years have passed since we last shortened the working day, meaning when we won the right to eight hours,” he said in an interview in Madrid. “In the past 100 years, we’ve continued to produce more with fewer hours of labour, and yet this ability to produce more thanks to technology hasn’t generated more free time for people.”
Errejon, 37, was calling for a four-day work week even before the Covid-19 pandemic, but said it was now more plausible in Spain because the crisis had shown that greater flexibility was possible in the workplace.
Still, he acknowledged he had an uphill battle to make this more than just an experiment. Sanchez agreed to the pilot in January on the condition that Mas Pais voted in favour of the administration’s spending plan under the European Union’s recovery fund.
Since then, ministers and other top officials have said a four-day work week was not a policy priority.