A total of 41 companies, employing 503 workers, have requested the Ministry of Industry participate in the pilot program to implement the four-day work week, as EL PERIÓDICO has learned. The Government has available a fund of 10 million euros budget to allocate grants of up to €200,000 per applicant company and will not end up exhausting it, since the aid requested amounts to 2.8 million euros.
The applicant companies employ 503 employees and Catalonia has numbers of being the region with the largest number of participants in the pilot. The 41 applications from industrial SMEs come from 13 autonomous communities: Catalonia (11), Andalusia (6), Galicia (4), Basque Country (4), Principality of Asturias (3), Comunidad Foral de Navarra (3), Canarias ( 3), Community of Madrid (2), Cantabria (1), Castilla y León (1), Castilla La Mancha (1), Extremadura (1), Balearic Islands (1).
The companies that could apply were SMEs from the industrial sector or associated consultancies and their commitment involves a reduction of at least 10% of the ordinary working day of part of their staff, without salary reduction. The origin of this pilot is in the negotiations of the 2021 General Budgets, when Más País agreed to support the accounts in exchange for the Government including in them a fund to test a pilot for companies to test the four-day week.
Now the Ministry of Industry must study these 41 applications, weigh them, through competitive competition, and distribute those 2.8 million euros of aid requested. What will give those 41 companies access – if they all meet the requirements – to the first pilot program to test the feasibility of the 32-hour day (or similar). Spain thus follows in the footsteps of other neighboring states, such as the United Kingdom, which have also recently launched their own pilots on reduced hours.
From now on, a maximum period of five months in which the Ministry of Industry, via the School of Industrial Organization (EOI) resolves and notifies the chosen companies of the granting of the subsidy. In other words, the companies that start implementing the pilot will start around the end of the year. In Catalonia, the graphic arts company Publiserveia pioneer in applying for the 32-hour weekly pilot, has confirmed to EL PERIÓDICO its participation in the public program.
“This first pilot program shows that companies are open to new ways of organizing their working hours, with reductions in working time without affecting wages and improving their results: everyone wins, SMEs and workers”, has valued the Minister of Industry, Hector Gomez, it’s a statement. Although the allocation of funds will take place under her command, the preparation of the pilot was in charge of the recently ex-minister maroto kingstoday a PSOE candidate for mayor of Madrid.
How will Industry decide who participates and who doesn’t?
The bases of the call published a month ago by the Ministry of Industry establish a series of criteria that will determine which companies end up participating in the pilot and which are left out. The public program requires a mix between the economic viability of the company and the expected impact on the quality of life of the workforce. However, while there have been fewer applicant companies than the budget available for them, if the 41 comply with the basic formalities, they will all end up participating in the pilot.
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Those applicant companies have previously had to present a study on what measures they plan to take to make sustainable, beyond public aid, the fact of having all or part of the workforce earning the same but working fewer hours. And it is that after two years the public subsidy will run out, but the companies agree to continue implementing the reduction in working hours without reduction in salary. And they must be viable for it, what happens to improve their productivity. Something that has thrown back some of the potentially interested companies.
The companies, which must hire the services of a consultant to monitor a series of indicators, must also present a plan to demonstrate that they will improve the reconciliation of their employees’ personal and work lives, in order to minimize the absenteeism and the stress of the employees. Each corporation has presented its own planning and it may not be possible for all employees on the staff to see their hours reduced. The greater the proportion they reduce, the more points they have to receive the public subsidy.