Spain’s civil servants brace for 35-hour week as clock ticks to friday decree
Madrid’s corridors of power are bracing for a stampede out of the office at 15:00. If union leaders sign off tomorrow, every pen-pusher from Tax Agency clerks to Melilla prison guards will switch to a 35-hour week by Friday, courtesy of a royal decree the Cabinet has ready to fire.
The 2022 handshake that almost died
Prime Minister Sánchez shook hands with CCOO and UGT three years ago promising lighter loads and partial retirement, then watched the fine print choke in committee. The hang-up: prison officers, teachers and Ceuta health workers were left off the shorter-week map, while April’s pension reform quietly killed early-exit contracts for anyone still on the payroll. Roughly 14,000 resignation letters have been frozen in HR inboxes since.
Monday’s midnight meeting changed the math. Civil-service chief Milagros Tolón told union bosses the exclusions shrink to military and police uniforms only; everyone else gets the knife. The draft decree, seen by Coastal Code, also scraps waiting periods for part-time slots, lets staff bunch their 25-75 % hour cuts into a single block and allows the maneuver up to 36 months before normal retirement age.
Back-door hiring boom looms
The kicker: departments can now hire temporary “relief” replacements, a loophole unions demanded to stop desks piling high when veterans vanish. Those temps will be grandfathered into the next public-job exam cycle, turning stopgaps into permanent fixtures without a fresh contest. Tolón’s team calculates €420 million a year in extra payroll, money the Treasury has already parked in the contingency fund.
Not everyone is cheering. CSIF calls the offer “a plaster on a haemorrhage” and warns prison wardens could still sue if their 24-hour guard rotations clash with the new cap. Comisiones Obreras, frozen out of the final haggle, vows to challenge the decree in court, arguing only a full parliamentary statute can rewrite labour conditions. Their fear: once the rule is published, unions lose leverage for the bigger fight—equal pay with regional civil servants who already enjoy 35-hour weeks.
The clock is ruthless. Ministries must submit staffing plans by 1 May; HR software patches go live over the weekend. If the unions blink, the first 35-hour timecards start ticking Monday. If they balk, Tolón keeps the decree in a drawer and another election-year promise quietly expires. Either way, 2.8 million public workers will know by Friday whether the exit door just got three hours closer.