Gradually reduce the maximum weekly working day to 32 hours in 2032, establish a single interruption that does not exceed one hour on split days, extend the mandatory weekly rest to two days and ensure that those who work in shifts cannot work more than five nights in a row are some of the measures that the experts from the Time Use Initiative (TUI) want the European Union to regulate as a community directive to guarantee all Europeans a more balanced organization of working time, regardless of the country they live in.
This is reflected in the document of public policy recommendations that was presented and debated yesterday by international and local experts in the organization of work hours within the framework of Time Use Week 2023, which is being held these days in Barcelona.
“The proposal is the result of the reflection that TUI has been carrying out for some time, a non-profit organization that wants to put the right to time on the political agenda and that has already prepared a report for the Ministry of Labor with more than 100 proposals that should serve as a basis for the future Spanish law on the use of time,” Ariadna Güell, co-coordinator of the TUI, explains to La Vanguardia.
Now they have decided to transfer some of these measures to the competent bodies of the European Union so that they adapt the corresponding directives and thus force the governments of all countries to advance in this field and offer a harmonized framework of rights and duties for all European workers.
The first of the measures in the document presented yesterday by Mari Luz Vega, former official of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and one of its authors, is the reduction of working time. It is proposed to gradually reduce the maximum working day. The first step would be to set a limit of 37.5 hours per week for all business sectors in 2026 and, from there, lower it until reaching 32 hours in 2032. “This would allow us to homogenize what is already a reality in the average number of hours worked in Europe, although in the labor legislation of many member states the working day is still 38 and 40 hours,” indicate the TUI experts.
Another of the proposed reforms is aimed at avoiding unpredictable and improvised days.
Specifically, it is requested that companies be obliged to inform their employees about the minimum number of guaranteed working hours, the time and days in which the employee can be required to work, the regulation of overtime, the time with which It will notify the worker when there are changes in their schedule... The objective is for the employee to be clearer about their working time and to be able to plan their life better even if their workday is variable.
The TUI experts – who have prepared their document with contributions from labor law specialists Anna Ginés (Esade), Raquel Serrano (UB) and the aforementioned Mari Luz Vega (UCM) – believe that the European authorities should also limit the breaks in the working day so that work does not end up colonizing people's entire agenda. They propose that there can only be a single interruption in the split days, and of no more than one hour, a change that would clearly affect Spain, where the lunch break in many jobs is very long and means that work is then finished. very late.
Other proposed measures are to extend the weekly rest to two days for all sectors, that employees with rotating shifts cannot work more than five consecutive nights, that those over 50 years of age who work at night have the right to request a change to a position daytime, make the options for reductions in working hours more flexible so that they can be discontinuous throughout the week, month or year, or that they can be requested to care for people with whom they live, even if there is no family relationship.
