The National Confederation of SMEs (CONPYMES), a national organization representing more than 2 million SMEs and self-employed workers in Spain, held a Business Summit at the Casa Árabe in Madrid under the slogan “Reduction of Working Hours: Not This Way.” Dozens of associations and guilds of small and medium-sized businesses from different economic sectors nationwide participated in the summit.
The signatories regret that the regulations have not taken into account the type of activity, the different impact depending on the size of companies or different economic sectors, or new forms of work, such as objective-based employment, teleworking, or irregular distribution of working hours to promote work-life balance.
The signatories regret that the regulations have not taken into account the type of activity, the different impact depending on the size of companies or different economic sectors, or new forms of work, such as objective-based employment, teleworking, or irregular distribution of working hours to promote work-life balance.
The manifesto emphasizes that amending by law issues that are the subject of collective bargaining agreements, such as reduced working hours, and which, in fact, are already being agreed upon bilaterally in collective bargaining agreements, constitutes an interference with the autonomy of collective bargaining, enshrined in Article 37.1 of the Constitution, which establishes the constitutional framework for collective bargaining, guaranteeing this right and the binding force of the agreement.
In this context, the president of CONPYMES, José María Torres, lamented that “we are witnessing a legal imposition of reduced working hours, which represents a significant increase in costs without compensation, both for permanent and full-time employees and for part-time employees.”
Flexibility for Small Businesses
Furthermore, the manifesto states that this regulatory change is not just a reduction in working hours to 37.5 hours, but rather seeks to: reduce working hours; create a new working hours record, which violates the right to freedom of enterprise and privacy, and at the same time entails an implicit presumption of business non-compliance with working hours, which is unacceptable; strengthen the right to digital disconnection, with the worker’s right not to be contacted outside of working hours; and change the penalty regime, increasing the amount of penalties.
On the other hand, in the document, the signatories regret that the regulations have not taken into account the type of activity, the different impact depending on the size of companies or different economic sectors, or new forms of work, such as objective-based employment, teleworking, or irregular distribution of working hours to promote work-life balance.
José María Torres: “When we replace the culture of effort with one of public aid, when we encourage subsidies more than entrepreneurship, and we are told that working less will make us happier, we enter a dynamic that will have a very bleak outlook for the future of our country.”
It also fails to take into account the flexibility with which smaller companies and the self-employed, in many cases family businesses, operate, which will make the implementation of the 37.5-hour work week tracking system difficult. Failure to do so will result in very high fines of up to €10,000 per worker, a decision that radically changes the current sanctions, which are applied per company and do not reach €7,500.
We also believe that these measures, along with others being promoted by the Ministry, undermine collective bargaining and, to a certain extent, freedom of enterprise. They also stigmatize our country’s business owners by establishing unreasonable oversight of their activities, based on the presumption that they systematically violate current labor regulations.
For all these reasons, Torres, who closed the Business Summit, stated that “when the culture of effort is replaced by one of public aid, when we encourage subsidies more than entrepreneurship, and we are told that working less will make us happier, we enter a dynamic that will have a very bleak outlook for the future of our country.”
“That is why the time has come to say enough is enough. The time has come for all organizations to be more united than ever and defend our rights, for the future of our companies, for the future of our children, and for the future of our country. Not like this!” he concluded.
