Martí Sistané in l’Eco de Sitges: Two decades ago I took part in Girona in a series of sessions between business owners from different sectors and banking executives to talk about business and productivity. Among the speakers was a senior banking executive of the time, who held forth at length predicting that in a future, unspecified in time but not far off according to him, weeks would be divided according to whether the main factor in one’s working activity was production or services. More or less, he was saying there would be two big groups: those who would work Monday to Thursday, with a 30-hour working week, and the rest, who would work in the world of services and leisure, from Thursday to Sunday.
These past months, with the commotion generated by the imminent reduction of the working week from 40 to 37.5 hours, on the way to 35 hours worked by the end of the cycle, I have remembered that talk which, it has to be said, was listened to with great scepticism. According to the Ministry of Labour, the reduction in the working week will affect 12 million people who work more than 37.5 hours a week in Spain. The length of the working week has not been touched since 1983; at that time it was 43 or 42 hours, depending on whether the worker did a continuous or a split shift.
It goes without saying that reducing the weekly working hours raises numerous doubts, and all the more so when you look at its impact on the country’s productivity. The close connection between the two variables raises a warning about the impact it will have on productivity in a country like Spain that stands out for its low productivity levels. There are voices warning that what happened in France could be repeated, where productivity levels fell after the reduction to 35 hours was applied, while also causing the country to lose economic weight. Labour productivity here has been a cause for concern for more than two decades.
Compared with the European average, according to Eurostat figures, in 2022 Spain stood 16.5 points below the euro area average for labour productivity per hour worked and 8.2 points below the average of the 27 EU countries. Far from being solved, this phenomenon has worsened in recent years. According to Funcas, productivity per employee between 1985 and 2022 has grown by 28% in Spain, while in the seven most advanced European economies growth has been 54%. Having low labour productivity directly harms wellbeing. The higher the productivity, the more investment, the more hiring, the higher the wages and the more tax revenue, in short more funding for the welfare state.
Beyond whether the measure of reducing the working week is the right one or not and, what is more, doing it without generating an open dialogue with the employers’ associations, in my view it is absurd to tackle a reduction in the working week without facing up to the problem of our companies’ low productivity.
Digitization can increase the competitiveness and productivity of employees and companies, but deep changes are needed, not only in the use of technology, but in other factors just as important such as skills, communication, leadership, training, the application of artificial intelligence, the working climate, incentives or work-life balance. If we only reduce the working week, without tackling all these other key aspects in depth, the result will probably be that we will fail to improve productivity and will instead make it worse still. In a county like ours where, far from being an exception, productivity indices are not among the most successful, quite the contrary, we will need a great deal of ingenuity and daring to turn this new challenge into an opportunity. That said, whether we manage it or not, returning to the prediction of that visionary banking executive we mentioned at the start of the article, we can always start thinking about what to do with all this new leisure time the shorter working week will give us.