Industrial SMEs with less than 250 workers can request from today and for a month the aid associated with the pilot program of the Ministry of Industry for the reduction of the working week to four days without cutting wages.
The Official State Gazette (BOE) carries this Thursday the call for aid, once the ministerial order was published in December with the bases of a program that has a budget of 9.65 million euros that will be managed by the Fundación Escuela de Organización Industry (EOI).
Companies will be eligible for aid of up to 200,000 euros if they reduce 10% of the working day for a minimum of 24 months without lowering wages.
The objective of the program is to promote the improvement of productivity in small and medium-sized private companies that carry out an industrial activity.
"I encourage companies to take advantage of this program and present their initiatives", declared the Minister of Industry, Héctor Gómez, in a statement in which he stressed that it is about offering industrial SMEs "a new way of organizing their conferences with reductions in working time without affecting wages and improving their business results".
The program will support the expenses associated with this reorganization and part of the salary costs incurred.
According to Industry, as it is an experimental project and with a reduced budget, it has been decided to restrict it to the industrial sector "in order to achieve sufficient statistical representation that allows conclusions to be drawn based on data that can later be scaled to the rest of the economy."
The parliamentary debate on reducing the working week from 40 to 32 hours was opened by Más País, which conditioned its support for the 2021 budgets on the launch of a pilot program.
The economic endowment to implement it was finally contemplated in the 2022 budgets, although its start-up has arrived in 2023.
Más País defends this measure not only to improve business productivity, but also due to the lack of work-life balance, and due to health problems associated with excessive working hours.
At the regional level, the Valencian Community already launched its own subsidized pilot program last summer for companies that reduce at least 20% of the working day in weekly computation for a minimum of one year.
The Basque Country also plans to test next year the reduction in working hours without a decrease in salary as a way of retaining talent and promoting conciliation.
The city of Valencia is carrying out an analysis this month of the effects of the four-day work week on health and well-being, the environment and the economy, taking advantage of the four bank holiday Mondays between April and May.
The reduction of the working day from 40 to 32 hours has been a union demand for years, but only a few companies apply it in Spain -mainly technological ones with highly qualified personnel-, while others have opted for concentrated hours and some have offered to cut hours in exchange for salary reductions.
No large European country has legislative projects under way to implement the 32-hour work week, beyond the pilot experiences carried out in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
The 35-hour work week in France is the shortest, while other countries such as Belgium or Greece give the possibility of concentrating the work week in fewer days but without reducing the number of hours worked.
