Spurred by lockdown, Spain tinkers with 4-day workweek
MADRID — After years of waiting tables, Danae De Vries is one step closer to achieving her lifetime dream of becoming a theater coach.
Ironically, she owes that to the pandemic. It was after last year’s brutal lockdown that shut the Spanish economy down for weeks that the owners of a small restaurant chain in Madrid offered De Vries to cut her weekly work schedule by one day.
Already struggling to make ends meet in a city that has seen rental prices spiral, the 28-year-old was hesitant at first — and then enthusiastic when she was told her wages would remain untouched.
“Now I have time to work, to see my family and friends, and to find enough time to study,” she said. “It’s marvelous to have time, to not rush everywhere and find a bit of inner peace.”
A happier and more motivated De Vries is also better for her boss Maria Alvarez, the entrepreneur who turned her two-restaurant business upside-down when she proposed rotational four-day week shifts. Alvarez, a mother of two toddlers, and her startup partner at La Francachela had both struggled to keep the business going with no child care support.
“There was a feeling that society had turned its back on families, that we had been betrayed,” Alvarez said. “As business owners, we had to come up with some solutions for our businesses, our employees and also for our personal lives.”
Experimenting with cutting back one workday per week is about to go nationwide in Spain — the first country in Europe to do so. A three-year pilot project will be using $59 million from the European Union’s massive coronavirus recovery fund to compensate some 200 mid-size companies as they resize their workforce or reorganize production workflows to adapt to a 32-hour working week.
The funds will go to subsidizing all of the employers’ extra costs in the first year of the trial and then reduce the government’s aid to 50% and 25% each consecutive year, according to a blueprint by the Mas Pais progressive party that’s behind the initiative.
The only condition is that the readjustment leads to a real net reduction of working hours while maintaining full-time contract salaries, explained Hector Tejero, a lawmaker with Mas Pais in the Madrid regional assembly.
Reducing work hours from 40 to 35 per week in 2017 would have resulted in a 1.5% GDP growth and 560,000 new jobs, a study published this year in the Cambridge Journal of Economics found.
Salaries would have also increased nationally by 3.7%, especially benefiting women who more often take part-time jobs, the research said.
Critics say that a pandemic-shaken economy is not the best scenario for experiments. Some experts argue that the priority should instead be fixing the country’s dysfunctional labor market, which is dragging one of Europe’s highest unemployment rates and is marred by low-wage jobs.