Madrid (EFE).- Industrial SMEs with less than 250 workers can request from today and for a month the aid associated with the pilot program of the Ministry of Industry to reduce the work week to four days without cutting wages.
The Official State Gazette (BOE) publishes this Thursday the call for aid, after the ministerial order was published last December with the bases of a program that has an amount of 9.65 million euros with charge to the budget of the EOI Foundation.
Companies that join this subsidized pilot program will be eligible for aid of up to 200,000 euros if they reduce 10% of the working day for a minimum of 24 months without lowering wages.
The number of workers participating in the pilot project must affect at least 30% of the workforce in companies with up to 20 workers and 25% in companies with between 21 and 249 workers.
The objective of the program is to promote the improvement of productivity in small and medium-sized private companies that carry out an industrial activity.
Program arising from the agreement with Más País
The political debate on the reduction of the work week from 40 to 32 hours was opened in the Más País Congress, which conditioned its support for the 2021 budgets to the launch of a pilot program.
The 2021 budgets did not include the economic endowment to implement it, which was finally contemplated in the 2022 accounts, although the start-up has arrived in 2023.
Más País defends this measure not only to improve business productivity, but also to provide solutions to the problems associated with excessive working hours in the health of workers and work-life balance.