Every year the BOE publishes the work calendar of the autonomous communities that includes national holidays and those specific to each locality based on their traditions and annual festivals.
In total, there are 12 regional non-working days, apart from Sundays, and two local holidays that each council selects among the other 353 days in the almanac.
In this particular sudoku of festivities, the city of Valencia will experience five consecutive weeks between April and May where only four days a week will be worked.
This exceptional situation, beyond the accumulation of festivities in this month, is also due to the launch of a pilot project developed by the mayor of Valencia, Joan Ribó.
The leader of Compomís wants to make the Valencian capital the first European city to test the benefits of a 32-hour or four-day work week.
To square the full holiday in April, the local board, governed in coalition with the PSPV-PSOE, approved moving a local holiday for the month of January, San Vicente Martir, which in 2023 fell on a Sunday, to Monday the 24th of this month. They even gave up giving some of the days before or after Fallas as a holiday, since San José (March 19) is on the weekend.
“This is not a program to reduce working hours, because that is not the responsibility of the Valencia City Council, but of employers’ associations and unions. It is about doing a test, an experience, an exercise in innovation, which often does not consist solely of invent pots and pans to do business”, highlighted Ribó in the presentation of the project. “We want to see what happens with sectors such as restaurants, tourism, transport, EMT, what would be the response of the families”, she assured.
In Spain, the idea of ??moving holidays to the days closest to the weekend, that is, to a Monday or a Friday, is not a new idea, although it has not caught on to date.
Mariano Rajoy announced it in his investiture speech in 2011, but it was never heard from again. Originally, it was a demand from employers to the leader of the Popular Party with the aim of reducing costs and increasing the competitiveness of companies in the midst of the economic crisis.
However, the announcement did not sink in either with the arrival of Pedro Sánchez at La Moncloa in 2017, nor in the different proposals agreed by United We Can. Among its greatest defenders is the leader of Más País, Iñigo Errejón.
The origin of the four-day working day many place it in the New Zealand company Perpetual Guardian, dedicated to the administration of trusts and wills.
In 2018, he successfully experimented with the four-day work week for the first time with eight-hour days and a five-hour salary.
On the other hand, the last large study on the reduction of the working day to four days took place in the United Kingdom. Sixty-one committed to a 20% reduction in working hours for all staff, with no decrease in wages, for a six-month period starting in June 2022. The result: the vast majority of companies also They maintained productivity goals full-time.
According to this English study, 71% of the 2,900 employees stated that they had less “exhaustion” and 39% stated that they were less stressed than at the beginning of the test.
Traditionally the calendar of holidays in the capital of Turia during Holy Week is always on Good Friday as in the rest of Spain. This time, on April 7.
In the following week it will also be a holiday on Monday, April 10 on the occasion of Easter Monday and also on Monday, April 17, the feast of San Vicente Ferrer, patron saint of the Valencian Community.
To complete the fourth Monday, the mayor proposed moving to April 24 the non-working condition in the city of the day of San Vicente Mártir that usually takes place on January 22, but this year it was Sunday.
In this 2023 Monday, May 1, Labor Day, is a national holiday. Thus completing a labor puzzle of five weeks with four working days.
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