Flexible Working and Gender Equality: The Case of Spain

Despite working time is included in the collective bargaining, flexible arrangements are not usually introduced. Only 7.9% of workers and 5.9 % of collective agreements1 contained special clauses on working time distribution, while 87.8% of workers and 86.8% of agreements contain clauses on annual working time, holidays and special shifts. This snap shot reflects either the lack of awareness of the importance flexibility has or the lack of agreement between trade unions and employers associations on this particular issue. Beyond this general legal and institutional context, flexible working time arrangements in Spain are not currently being generally discussed either in the political arena or in the collective bargaining. The high unemployment rate, 20.6% of active men and 21.3% of active women, is the central focus of most labour market policies and initiatives. Among the four flexible working time arrangements specified in the Netherlands’ case study, just part-time is widely considered as a common arrangement to integrate flexible working time in companies. In particular, some changes introduced in the labour law 2 in 2007 supporting part-time for care reasons have improved the conditions and legal back of employees who use it. However, part-time is not a voluntary decision in more than half of the cases 3 . Thus, when it is used because workers do not find a full-time job, it is not considered as a