The labor minister hopes to maintain Spain’s far proper at bay, whereas successful employees extra free time. Will she pull it off?
Yolanda Díaz
(Jesús Hellín / Europa Press by way of AP)
The phrase Yolanda Díaz Pérez makes use of greater than some other is “cambiar la vida de la gente” (change the lives of the folks). I used to be talking with the labor minister and second deputy prime minister of Spain on Zoom this spring, after my first encounter along with her final November. A couple of days after Donald Trump’s reelection, Díaz had convened an Worldwide Labor Congress in Madrid. Bringing collectively labor ministers, union officers, researchers, and activists from around the globe, she referred to as for “a global alliance for labor rights.” All by means of the convention, Díaz, wearing white, listened fastidiously and took notes from her seat on the entrance of the room.
Díaz ascended to excessive workplace throughout a time of successive crises—globally, domestically, and inside Spain’s fractious left. She grew up in a transport city in Galicia, on Spain’s Atlantic coast, an space with a historical past of union militancy, and has moved by means of varied left-leaning coalitions in her rise from native politics—beginning because the deputy mayor of Fene, her hometown—to the very middle of nationwide energy. Whereas throughout her, European social democratic events collapse, Díaz has maintained a popularity for pragmatism and deal-making. Amid polarization and infighting, she has introduced actual enhancements to the Spanish folks.
At present, she is the chief of the junior celebration in Spain’s coalition authorities. Our dialog came about earlier than a contemporary spherical of scandals throughout the senior celebration—the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE)—would as soon as once more name into query the steadiness of the coalition in July. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has been the face of that authorities all through its highs—resisting Trump’s stress to hike army spending alongside the remainder of NATO; talking out in opposition to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza—and its lows: the revelations of corruption inside his celebration and the requires his resignation, principally from his right-wing rivals.
Díaz, in the meantime, has led the cost on financial coverage by means of two consecutive coalitions with the PSOE. She has pushed for labor insurance policies which have improved wages and situations for Spain’s lowest-paid employees and broadened collective bargaining, and watched the Spanish economic system prosper consequently. Rising from the wreckage of Podemos, the left coalition of the post-financial-crisis years, she has helped maintain off the rise of the far proper in Spain, and has been touted because the nation’s potential first feminine prime minister, however she has additionally struggled to present her new left celebration, Sumar—typically translated as “Unite”—a coherent identification of its personal. Launched in 2023 for the nationwide elections in Spain, the celebration introduced collectively greater than a dozen progressive and leftist teams underneath its electoral banner, with Díaz on the head as its candidate for prime minister.
However Spain, not like many different Western international locations, was an authoritarian dictatorship for many years: Francisco Franco was nonetheless in energy when Díaz was born, and her father was imprisoned for union activism throughout Franco’s reign. That’s helped to maintain the far proper politically poisonous, however the nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist Vox celebration has made positive factors lately. (One in every of its marketing campaign posters famously depicted a hand tossing symbols of gender fairness and LGBTQ rights right into a rubbish can.) Vox has additionally performed a central function in what Díaz has referred to as “the Worldwide of Hate,” internet hosting a gathering shortly earlier than the European elections that included France’s Marine Le Pen, Argentine President Javier Milei, and Israeli Likud minister Amichai Chikli, and video visits from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Now Díaz faces her greatest problem but: to move a legislation that would cut back the nation’s workweek from 40 to 37.5 hours. Will probably be a check case of whether or not she will maintain a political group that depends on greater than her private charisma—and of whether or not the European left can succeed based mostly on a mannequin of change like hers.
Present Difficulty
The mainstream press likes to level out that Díaz is a longtime member of the Communist Occasion, as her father was earlier than her. (Whereas she typically says that she retains the membership in tribute to her father, she additionally wrote the foreword to a brand new Spanish version of The Communist Manifesto in 2021.) However Díaz was a labor lawyer earlier than she entered politics, which skilled her properly for sitting at bargaining tables with employers and employees and hammering out offers. (She additionally had a behavior of displaying as much as conferences along with her child in her arms.) Maybe due to that coaching, Díaz’s ideological commitments have led to precise successes.
“They instructed us that elevating the minimal wage was going to sink the economic system,” she says. “Effectively, The Economist acknowledges that this isn’t the case and that we even have the biggest variety of employed women and men within the historical past of Spanish democracy.” And, she notes, the numbers again her up—as do commentators who aren’t normally within the enterprise of praising communists. The Economist, she factors out, ranked Spain the best-performing economic system on the earth in 2024, with a 3.2 % enhance in GDP—the nation was liable for 40 % of the eurozone’s progress final yr—and had its lowest unemployment fee since 2007, earlier than the monetary disaster.
The shorter workweek, Díaz says, could be a technique to redistribute the positive factors of productiveness. “From the ’90s to at the moment, productiveness has elevated by 53 % and the wages of male employees and feminine employees solely 22 %,” she says. “What we would like is to unfold productiveness at a time when the revenue margins of corporations are great.”
World wide, the venture of shortening the workweek has introduced collectively unions just like the United Auto Employees and tutorial researchers like Joan Sanchis, an affiliate professor of utilized economics on the Universitat de València and the creator of Quatre dies: Treballar menys per viure en un món millor (4-Day Week: Working Much less to Reside in a Higher World). It has revived a convention of combating for shorter hours that stretches again a whole lot of years, by means of the Haymarket Riots and Eleanor Marx’s labor activism, however dropped off after World Warfare II. The four-day week was a part of the Labour Occasion’s platform underneath Jeremy Corbyn, and Bernie Sanders has backed it, writing in 2024, “At a second in historical past when synthetic intelligence and robotics will radically rework our economic system, it’s time to be sure that working folks profit from this elevated productiveness, not simply company CEOs and the billionaire class.… It’s time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay.”
Nevertheless it was not, Sanchis says, a coverage that Díaz took to at first. The type of union household she got here from, he says, predisposed her to an outlook that noticed a job as one thing that deserved respect, somewhat than one thing from which employees would possibly need to be liberated. However because the coverage drew extra consideration inside Podemos, Díaz reconsidered it, and by 2020 she was talking in favor of work-time discount. The shorter workweek was a part of the platform when Sumar launched in 2023, and a small discount of two and a half hours per week—half an hour a day—was a part of the settlement when Díaz fashioned the present coalition authorities with the PSOE.
“It’s true that helpful politics will not be about differentiating the fabric situations of life from the symbolic,” Díaz says. “Every part is vital. The venture that we’re finishing up now in my nation to scale back the working time, that I share with Bernie Sanders—it’s a political proposal to enhance folks’s lives, however it’s also a political proposal to advance freedom. That’s to say it’s also symbolic. The fabric and the symbolic are completely complementary in public insurance policies.”
Chema Martínez is the final secretary of the service sector within the Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), or Employees’ Commissions, Spain’s largest commerce union federation, which represents, he says, some 70 % of Spanish service-sector employees. He sees the coverage as one “with a protracted custom” on the left and “within the commerce unions, during which we expect that it’s doable to scale back the working day quantitatively with out dropping productiveness.” Legally, he explains, the workweek in Spain is 40 hours, and lots of sectors already work fewer. However for some—particularly in companies—the hours are fairly lengthy. Certainly, the primary opposition to the invoice comes from small and medium-size corporations, Sanchis says, notably in tourism and hospitality.
However in opposition to that type of opposition, Martínez has seen firsthand how Díaz’s labor reforms have reworked lives. Spain’s labor disaster within the Seventies and ’80s resulted in excessive unemployment and excessive inflation, and governments since that point have used precarious, momentary labor contracts to get younger folks into work with fewer rights and protections. Based on Martínez, till the coalition authorities modified the legislation in 2021, nearly a 3rd of all employees’ contracts have been part-time, and people employees could be the primary to get fired when the financial winds modified. With Díaz’s reforms, he says, that quantity has fallen beneath 10 % within the personal sector, on the similar time that employment has grown throughout the nation. “All that is inflicting the inequality hole to slim,” Martínez says.
The Spanish success story is notable in comparison with what has occurred in Italy underneath the “post-fascist” Giorgia Meloni, the place, in response to Paolo Gerbaudo, a senior researcher on the College of Political Science and Sociology on the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, most stimulus funds went to corporations, which in flip used them for share buybacks and bonuses. Italy’s progress has been sluggish, whereas Spain’s investments in high-speed rail and renewable vitality, together with these labor insurance policies, introduced its economic system to the highest of The Economist’s charts, surpassing the eurozone’s supposed energyhomes, France and Germany.
Whereas it’s indirectly underneath her purview, Díaz additionally performed a task within the Spanish authorities’s success at mitigating inflation, whereas the remainder of Europe and the US struggled. After the federal government capped the costs of important items and imposed a (momentary) tax on wealth over €3 million, Díaz stepped into the fray, pushing for large supermarkets to supply an reasonably priced basket of products to shoppers. The economist Isabella Weber has famous that the Spanish authorities additionally moved “to observe company income and launched windfall revenue taxes on vitality corporations and banks.” These insurance policies, she wrote, not solely introduced inflation down in Spain earlier than the remainder of the eurozone; additionally they helped the coalition authorities stave off the suitable, with Vox dropping 19 of its 52 seats in Congress. To Díaz, all this serves to disprove the neoliberal thesis that decreasing requirements for employees is the one technique to spur funding.
“It isn’t an enchancment for simply our nation,” she says. “It’s an instance for the entire world.”
With all of those successes, it’s nearly a shock that the federal government will not be extra in style. However scandals have rocked the PSOE, and battles throughout the left, and between the events of the coalition, have eroded a few of these excessive approval scores. In 2021, Díaz was the most well-liked politician within the nation, however Sumar struggled finally summer season’s European elections, successful solely three seats. In response to these outcomes, Díaz stepped again from her place as coordinator of Sumar, although she maintained her submit in authorities.
“With the unconventional left in Europe, we regularly find yourself on this place the place they can’t type a authorities besides with the center-left, whereas the center-left has different choices,” Gerbaudo factors out. The middle-left events are likely to toss marginal events a bone or two—for example, management roles in ministries that it doesn’t think about terribly highly effective. Díaz’s tenure on the labor ministry is completely different on this respect: She has precise energy, and she or he’s used it. And her hope is that Sumar will construct on her successes and put extra folks like her in workplace. It isn’t sufficient, Díaz emphasizes, to be a “dam of containment to the intense proper.” She needs Sumar to grow to be a part of a global motion by providing coverage examples of what a state can do on behalf of its folks somewhat than “just a few minor oligarchs.”
Although Díaz did declare herself a candidate for the highest job within the final election, Gerbaudo believes that most individuals—together with Sánchez—nonetheless appeared to imagine that she was working to stay the junior accomplice in a coalition. That notion each benefited her—the PSOE targeted its fireplace on the suitable somewhat than on its left—and certain damage her, or not less than Sumar, which was seen within the press extra as a automobile for corralling a fractious left than a celebration really contending for energy.
Díaz, Sanchis says, was in a position to convey collectively a coalition partly as a result of she maintained good relationships with smaller regional left events throughout the nation. However she was additionally making an attempt to construct a brand new left establishment after the crack-up of Podemos in 2019. What remained of Podemos agreed to affix the Sumar alliance within the final elections—a little bit of a flip, as Díaz had represented the smaller faction throughout the Unidos Podemos slate within the earlier authorities—however then nearly instantly broke away as soon as the federal government was fashioned.
Whereas the PSOE held on and Sumar managed to stay the junior accomplice within the coalition, its margin has been too slender to do a lot. In the meantime, the courts—which, Gerbaudo notes, are essentially the most conservative wing of presidency in Spain, the one reformed the least after Franco’s dying—have been fertile floor for “lawfare” in opposition to the PSOE and the prime minister. A number of scandals, roughly confected, contain each Sánchez’s household and members of his celebration. Sumar had its personal disaster when Íñigo Errejón—a cofounder of Podemos who left to begin his personal celebration, Más País, which joined the Sumar alliance—was accused of sexual assault. Díaz stripped him of his management function however was criticized for not performing sooner.
And so the PSOE-Sumar coalition continues, though Sánchez is going through requires his resignation after an investigation in June discovered that the third-highest-ranking member of the PSOE was concerned in taking kickbacks associated to public works initiatives. Díaz referred to as for a “reset” and for the federal government to return to its concentrate on passing laws that helps working folks, however the scandals depart her in a tough place. Vox’s leaders are salivating on the likelihood to painting the left as corrupt; Sumar should discover a technique to distance itself from its coalition companions’ scandals whereas persevering with to take credit score for the federal government’s successes. If Sánchez falls, will he take Sumar with him?
As the controversy over the workweek invoice continues in parliament, Díaz has tried to get the smaller events that assist the coalition authorities on board. As Martínez of the service employees’ union explains, right-wing nationalist events are a part of the coalition, however due to their ties to enterprise within the Catalan and Basque areas, they’ve resisted the coverage. Díaz’s earlier reforms helped her convey employers to the desk, however the shorter workweek proposal has been put ahead with out vital assist from enterprise. Based on Sanchis, proposals for subsidies or tax breaks for smaller companies are being mentioned so as to assist get extra of them on board, as Díaz as soon as once more tries to succeed in a compromise.
The thought of lowering working hours has broad recognition in Spain, Sanchis notes. He estimates that round 12 million folks would profit from the reform, and even the right-wing events are hesitant to oppose it outright: “Public opinion polls, you check out them, 80 % or extra individuals are in favor of this measure.” Even the Well-liked Occasion’s chief has made rhetorical gestures towards a four-day workweek, although in a manner that pits that coverage in opposition to Díaz’s proposal.
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“Each the Socialist celebration and Sumar know that they must work exhausting on this work-time discount proposal, as a result of if it fails, it will likely be the ultimate sign that the federal government is scrambling,” Sanchis says.
If that occurs, the far proper—in Spain, represented by Vox—is poised on the prepared. It has not given up its quest for energy, and there may be, even in Spain, an aura of inevitability concerning the rightward swing. “It is vitally hanging,” Martínez says, “that the polls say the next: Nearly all of Spaniards desire a progressive authorities, however they imagine that it’s not doable. That the ultra-right goes to win, as is going on in america, as is going on in Italy.” The far proper takes up a variety of house on social media, the place it focuses, he says, on three arguments: Democracy is a corrupt system the place politicians purchase off the folks with goodies; the general public pension system is a pyramid scheme; and taxes are theft.
That is the stress for the left in workplace: combating for each incremental reform so as to show to voters that they’ll materially profit, whereas trying to supply up a broader imaginative and prescient that transcends parliamentary maneuvering, and dealing to outline itself in opposition to each the center-left and the far proper. Díaz’s profession at this second is each a helpful mannequin to aspire to and a doable cautionary story.
On the second day of the Worldwide Labor Congress, Díaz took the stage as soon as once more to shut the occasion and invited contributors to affix her there to signal a World Constitution of Labor Rights, a doc that pledges assist for an agenda in marked distinction to the one which Trump has unleashed. Wearing white as soon as once more, Díaz spoke of her proposal for the shortened workweek—by way of each its materials results and its symbolic dimensions.
“Let’s begin by reclaiming time,” Díaz mentioned. “Time is the uncooked materials from which our lives are made, and there’s no hope doable with out time to set it in movement. That half-hour a day over the present workday is a small step stuffed with hope. It’s time to suppose, to relaxation, to care, for leisure, for tradition, to be extra free.” An alliance between unions, employees, and “the democratic power of progressive organizations,” she mentioned, “can transfer what appeared immovable.”
However that half-hour a day additionally stays remarkably contentious. At press time, a vote on the invoice had been postponed for additional negotiations with the pro-business events within the coalition, who’re in search of to water it down. In the meantime, unions, together with CCOO, have referred to as for mobilization in assist of the invoice. The results of the eventual vote could have wide-reaching implications for the path of Sumar and the Spanish left on the whole—to not point out for Díaz’s personal standing in authorities. Within the meantime, she’ll be doing what she’s executed since she was a labor lawyer: sitting at a desk and making an attempt to make a deal.
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