Spain races to cut civil servants’ week to 35 hours before april clock-in
The Spanish cabinet has quietly restarted the clock on its most delicate labour reform: stripping 2.5 hours off the 37.5-hour week for more than 200,000 central-government employees. Officials want the deal sealed, signed and published in the Official Gazette before April, according to people directly involved in the talks.
Why march matters
The calendar is brutal. A technical meeting on 19 March—just three working days after the next pay-roll cycle—will decide who is in and who is left holding the old schedule. Ministries must then draft service-specific instructions to keep hospitals, prisons, customs posts and tax hotlines open while their staff knock off at 14:00 on Fridays instead of 16:30.
The unions—CC OO, UGT and CSIF—walked out of the last session on 26 February after the Government floated a carve-out list that reads like a line-up of every sensitive badge in the country: military personnel, National Police, prison guards, teachers and health workers. Negotiators say the list is shrinking, but not fast enough to satisfy the picket-ready base.
The 35-hour line in the sand
Madrid’s argument is cold math. Each exempted group pushes the reform’s annual price tag—already hovering around €700 million—higher, while complicating shift coverage in 24-hour services. Yet the optics of telling a prison psychologist or a rural GP they are ‘too essential’ for a lighter week could detonate the coalition’s labour credibility weeks before regional elections.
Budget officials have run three scenarios. The widest coverage (all AGE staff) adds €1.2 billion to payroll. The narrowest (core admin only) keeps the tab at €450 million but leaves 40 % of civil servants outside the tent, eroding union support. The middle path—excluding only uniformed services—lands at €700 million and is the one ministers will slide across the table on 19 March.
What happens next
If the unions blink, the Government will convene the mesa general before 28 March for a rubber-stamp vote. Publication in the BOE would follow within 72 hours, meaning the first 35-hour payslips arrive with the April payroll. If they balk, the decree moves to summer, when holiday skeleton crews blunt strike turnout—an outcome both sides privately fear because it signals stalemate to 3.2 million public-sector voters.
Meanwhile, town halls and regional chiefs are watching like hawks. Valencia and the Basque Country already harmonise their calendars to central-government timetables; copy-cat demands could spread the reform to another 700,000 workers. The Treasury has warned municipalities it will not fund knock-on costs, so mayors must either raise local taxes or cut services.
One number tells the story: 104. That is how many working days remain until the summer recess. If the deal is not inked by then, Spain’s 35-hour week slips into 2025, another promissory note in a country that has written too many. The unions know it; the Government knows it. The clock on the wall reads 37.5, but everyone is already counting down from 35.