Unproductive incident of four working days

The Valencian Regional Government intends to implement a measure to reduce the working day from five to four hours, with a weekly shift of 32 hours. All this, subsidized from public funds for companies that benefit from the measure, at the rate of up to 200,000 euros over three years. The Valencian government believes that this way it will be possible to better reconcile professional and family life and will mean saving energy, while ensuring that productivity increases.

If they want reconciliation to be made easier, it would make a little more sense – even without it – to reduce the shift to five days, to ensure workers can leave earlier and achieve the above reconciliation. But what they propose is a three-day week, so it may not be easy to better adjust to each day.

On the other hand, they talk about saving energy, but what do they do with the industry? even for production? Many people find it more expensive to stop machines than to produce them every day. Where is the proposed savings?

Finally, the Valencian government affirms that productivity will be achieved in this way. If it’s so obvious, why should it subsidize the remedy? If companies believed that their productivity would increase in this way, would the Valencian government not believe that they would adopt measures without subsidies? The higher the productivity, the higher the yield per employee, which will reduce costs, which can be transferred to falling prices, which will increase sales and improve profits. For this reason, if companies do not do so, it is because they believe that they will not receive the said benefit in this way, thereby exposing the absurdity of this measure.

This is absurd and counterproductive, as it would only cause the opposite: a fall in productivity and with it, in production and, therefore, in employment. Spain suffers from a serious structural problem of productivity and needs to work more and better, efficiently, not less.

If we analyze by the hour what the latest EPA shows, we see how it declines; There is nothing to ensure that the same output will be maintained by subtracting hours from the day, which will increase productivity, but everything points to less work and less production, but with more public spending, subsidies from the Valencian government. .

The Left does not miss the opportunity to undermine the effort, the sacrifice, the sense of acknowledgment that one must work hard to get good results; He constantly attacks her with a number of subsidies that discourage the activity, which would make society capable of building a promising professional career without being able to depend on the said aid, which each person would have to put on himself, on his work, on his efforts. Depends on it, not the subsidy that the government in power wants to give.

Therefore, the path chosen by the Valencian government is the enemy of the workers’ ability to excel, their professional development and their struggle to improve and grow professionally. It resorts to public spending, for subsidies paid out of all taxpayer money, to propagate a populist measure and contrary to economic rationality, which can greatly damage economic structure and employment.