The Council of Ministers has approved, at the proposal of the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy, the Draft Law for the reduction of the maximum duration of the working day to thirty-seven and a half hours per week of effective work on average.
The Second Vice President and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, said that “this is not just another regulation, it is a country project that makes real life change.”
The reduction of the maximum working day has been addressed within the framework of Social Dialogue and transfers the agreement reached with the majority trade union organizations CCOO and UGT and which was signed on December 20, 2024, although it does not have the support of employers. The next phase is for the Draft to obtain support in Congress to be approved.
More than one hundred years since the approval of the eight-hour day
On April 4, 1919, the royal decree that set the maximum legal working day at eight hours a day or forty-eight hours a week was published in the Gazette of Madrid.
The rule was enacted after the intense strike carried out at the company La Canadiense during the previous months and with it Spain positioned itself at the European forefront, reducing a working day that used to occupy around twelve hours a day for six days a week as a result of the increases in the durations of working days that accompanied the context of the Industrial Revolution.
Internationally, the first Convention of the International Labor Organization (ILO) adopted on October 29, 1919 in Washington, the application of the principle of the eight-hour day or the forty-eight-hour week.
In our current democratic period, in 1983, in a new historic advance, the maximum duration of the ordinary working day was last reduced to the current forty hours per week of effective work.
