Spain’s civil service locks in 35-hour week by mid-april, prisons last to fold
Friday’s bargaining table ended with no thunder-clap agreement, but Madrid has quietly set the clock: Spain’s 2.8 million public employees will drop to a 35-hour week by mid-April. The promise, whispered by union delegates after a marathon session at the General State Administration (AGE), is the closest thing to a written guarantee the sector has seen in two decades of flexi-talk.
Sources inside CSIF and UGT told Business Insider España that the ministry pledged a draft resolution “without exclusions” before the weekend. If the text survives Friday’s final mesa, agencies will have 15 days to re-programme rosters, pushing the switch-over to the week of 14 April. A small print asterisk remains: prisons, Ingesa health staff and teachers must hash out shift-specific rules in side negotiations that could stretch into May.
Prisons still hold the detonator
Penitentiary institutions alone account for 65,000 employees and a 24/7 custody regime. Unions accept that guards will not see a pure four-day week; instead, ministries will fund extra interim hires to back-fill the lost hours. The maths is brutal: 7 hours less per head equals 455,000 weekly man-hours that must be bought back with temporary contracts or overtime cash. Treasury officials have already warned governors that budgets are frozen at 2024 levels.
The same arithmetic haunts Ingesa, the health service for Ceuta and Melilla, where medical staff work island schedules, and university lecture timetables that still obey a 40-hour medieval calendar. Each sub-sector has until 30 June to sign a rider or the national decree will be imposed by fiat, risking a summer of wild-cat stoppages.
Early-retirement valve opens in parallel
While the working-time bomb ticks, the government will slip through a royal decree on 31 March to unlock partial early retirement for labour-contract staff—those hired under the Convenio Único. More than 1,100 applications have been stuck since a 2025 reform tightened pension rules. HR chiefs admit the move is a safety valve: let the 60-somethings leave at 85 % pension, hire twenty-somethings on three-month temp deals, and the head-count stays neutral. Career civil servants, however, remain excluded; unions vow to strike if that line is not erased before summer.
The trade-off exposes the real deficit: the 2026 public-job offer is frozen because unions rejected a blank-page promise of “net employment” with no departmental quotas. Until Madrid tables hard vacancy numbers, recruitment will be a revolving door of six-month patches.
Friday’s draft, then, is less a labour reform and more a political pressure cooker: shrink working time, expand casual staff, and pray that essential services don’t blow up before the tourists arrive. Clock’s ticking; April is only three payroll cycles away.