The final version of the economic report accompanying the draft Law for the reduction of the maximum legal working hours to 37.5 hours per week acknowledges that the measure will increase the costs borne by companies by up to 7%. In black and white, the document prepared by the Ministry of Labour – which the newspaper El Mundo has accessed – not only admits the increase in the wage bill but reaches this conclusion while ignoring hundreds of allegations collected during the public consultation process from employers’ associations, autonomous communities, and even the forceful warning from the Ministry of Economy about the possible “adverse effects” that the regulation may have on the productive fabric.
The report states that “the reduction of the weekly working hours to a maximum of 37.5 hours on average in annual calculation without a reduction in salary will induce “an increase in the wage cost per hour worked of a maximum of 6.67%, in the event that the person was working 40 hours per week prior to the implementation of this reform.”
However, it assures that “this most pessimistic scenario is not the most widespread in Spain” because many companies already have working hours below the current legal maximum. Thus, it calculates that “the increase in the wage cost per hour worked expected for the average workday of the nearly 14.5 million workers in the private sector would be 2.21%, and there is even a group of more than 1.88 million workers for whom the wage cost per hour would not increase at all.
