Zahara de la Sierra, the Cadiz town that pioneered the four-day work week

Zahara de la Sierra is a small town in the Cádiz mountains with just 1,400 inhabitants and a town hall with a staff of 32. Starting this week, these employees will be able to decide whether to keep their five-day workweek or switch to four-day workweeks. Those who choose the latter option will have rotating Mondays or Fridays off, although they will also have to choose to work an afternoon to comply with the 35-hour workweek.

What's new isn't the four-day workweek itself, which some companies have already implemented, but rather the fact that the labor "experiment" has been implemented for the first time in a Spanish government . This happened after the successful negotiations for an agreement between the municipality's Socialist mayor, Santiago Galván, and the works council, which includes the CSIF union, reached a successful conclusion.

The implementation of a four-day workweek is voluntary for workers in Cádiz, but the 35 hours stipulated in the new Zahara de la Sierra town council agreement, which until now included 37.5, will not be voluntary. The council is thus abandoning the goal that Second Vice President Yolanda Díaz has been pursuing for over a year, without success.

After more than eleven months of negotiations, last December, the Minister of Labor agreed solely with the unions on the reduction, which has been stuck in the Congress of Deputies due to a lack of support for its passage; parliamentary arithmetic is not on its side. Junts remains in a "no" position, and the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party) has serious reservations about what was destined to become the flagship measure of the legislature.

The new labor regulations being implemented by the Cádiz City Council can serve as a "spearhead" for both other administrations and the labor market as a whole, insists the civil servants' union. This is what happened with the 15-day paternity leave , which was initially implemented for state administration employees in 2005 and later extended to all workers with the Equality Law.

Now, coinciding with the debate on reducing working hours, CSIF is calling on the government to implement a 35-hour workweek across all administrations and in all areas, up from the current 37.5 hours, which "is gradually being extended to the different regions, with some exceptions such as the State Administration ," it explains. But at the same time, the central office insists on "testing projects" that would allow the 35-hour workweek to be distributed over four days a week, "while always guaranteeing," they say, "the provision of services to citizens."

For the majority union among public employees, "this proposal opens the door to reflecting on issues such as work-life balance, reducing workplace stress, and preventing burnout." It also asserts that "in a context where more and more public employees experience high levels of pressure and work overload, as is the case, for example, in the healthcare sector, it is essential to move toward models that prioritize mental health, life balance, and a sustainable work rhythm."

The four-day strike has been a demand of left-wing parties such as Sumar, which was also supported at the end of last year by the president of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, with a proposal that clearly distanced himself from the party led by Yolanda Díaz, especially after he exchanged views on the measure with the president of CEOE, Antonio Garamendi .

The PP's proposal didn't resonate particularly well with business leaders, although the waters eventually settled with a consistent narrative: the cuts must be agreed upon through collective bargaining, free from legal impositions like those Yolanda Díaz is seeking, and taking into account the sectoral diversity of the productive fabric and productivity. This has been the argument of the business community , which is deeply concerned about the harm that a reduction in working hours without a pay cut would cause to SMEs.