Chloe Glover (Reporter)
ALMOST 90% of Spanish workers want to start and leave work earlier.
Spain could be moving to favour a more compact British 9 to 5 working day, according to a new study by sociological organisation Ulises.
Results showed 86% of full time employees wanted the change.
A further three out of four believed the working day should end at 6pm, while 64% signalled that they would like to turn the clocks back one hour to British GMT.
Another 67.5% of the 10,303 adult respondents showed willingness to have a lunch break of less than one hour in return for leaving earlier
But a resolute 40% told researchers that they would not be willing to bring their lunchtime forward to avoid disturbing Mediterranean meal time norms.
All very well for those working in an air-conditioned environment. But hardly suitable for outdoor grafters, builders etc.
Spain changing to GMT (and presumably GMT+1 in the summer) is a really bad idea and it could have an adverse effect on winter tourism because northern Europeans really value that extra hour of daylight. Long dark winter evenings are really depressing and most people in the UK dread having to change the clocks at the end of October – there has been much debate over the years about the UK changing to CET.
Spain really needs to rethink this one. The Balearics (the Bright Islands campaign) want to stay on summer time all year round and it was passed in the regional parliament last year so they will be strongly opposed to changing to GMT. Valencia have now said they want to do same to boost winter tourism and then there is the problem in Catalunya and the Basque Country where people work in France/live in Spain and vice versa.
You don’t need to change the time zone in order to change the working hours and there is nothing stopping office workers doing 9-5 now.
Madrid is west of London, so in pure geographical terms then GMT+0 is the ‘correct’ timezone and a move to this would just be putting it back to pre-Franco-tinkering timezone. Also, Portugal seem to manage alright.
As for the UK, the amount of daylight is the same irrespective of the clocks. So, although I agree that at this time of year it sucks going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark, if the clocks were an hour ahead then although the end of the day would be lighter, surely the morning darkness would just move further into the day?
90% of British workers would like to move to a 9 to 5 day.
Did they not try this scheme in a town or village in Spain some time ago and the people liked the idea as it gave them more time for family life.