At least 80,000 French people are settled there.
Work less to earn as much: a slogan that should probably make Nicolas Sarkozy shout. However, this will indeed be a reality in the near future. But not in the country formerly chaired by “Sarko”. While the general trend is to work more, especially longer, a contrary decision is about to be taken in a country particularly popular with the French, where more than 80,000 of them are officially expatriates.
In France, the sacrosanct 35 hours came into force in 2002. Since then, nothing has changed and France is one of the countries of the European Union where the legal working hours are the lowest, with Nordic countries. Elsewhere, it is more around 40 hours per week, notably in the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain. Except that on the other side of the Pyrenees, the situation will soon change.
If the French cross the southwest border, it is more for the living environment than for purchasing power. And very soon, those who work there will be able to benefit from a new measure which will reduce their weekly working time, without any loss of salary.
The Spanish government has in fact launched a major reform to gradually reduce the working week from 40 to 37.5 hours per week. This would be done in two stages: first going to 38.5 hours in the second half of 2024 then to 37.5 hours from 2025. This measure would allow 12 million private sector employees to work shorter hours , civil servants already working 37.5 hours.
At this stage, no agreement has yet been reached between the unions and employers, responsible for defining the implementation modalities. However, the Spanish Minister of Labor, Yolanda Diaz, wants to quickly bring the project to fruition. The objective is to introduce the new duration of weekly working hours this summer.
While two out of three Spaniards are obviously in favor of this measure, Parliament is more divided on the issue and a majority of votes in favor of moving to 37.5 hours is not guaranteed.
However, despite the legal duration of work, the statistics (Eurostat) show that Spaniards already work, on average, 36.5 hours per week, as much as in France (36.2)