The Chamber of Construction, through its president Alejandro Ruibal, is moving towards a preliminary agreement with SUNCA that gradually reduces the workweek from 44 to 40 hours over a five-year agreement, with countermeasures and some flexibility. It is presented as a “historic” and balanced advance. In reality, it is a mechanism that artificially increases the cost of labor, distorts incentives, and disproportionately punishes those who cannot pass the cost onto the public treasury.
When fewer hours are worked for the same salary, the hourly cost of labor immediately rises. In a labor-intensive sector like construction, this is not a minor detail: it raises the price of every square meter, every structure, every project. Productivity does not increase by decree; the value generated by a worker in an hour does not magically grow just because the agreement states that this hour is now “worth” more. The result is that production becomes more expensive. Those who cannot offset this increase with greater efficiency or higher prices simply lose margin, postpone investments, or close.
This is where the brutal difference between companies appears. Large firms that bill the State have a comfortable escape valve: they incorporate the higher labor cost into the final invoice. The State, which does not operate with the discipline of a private client that compares prices and demands quality, usually pays. The resources come from the taxes paid by everyone, including the workers of companies that do not have that privilege. It is a silent transfer: the extra cost is socialized while the large company maintains its profitability.
Medium and small companies, on the other hand, live in the real market. They compete for private clients who scrutinize the budget, who can choose another contractor or postpone the project. They do not have the capacity to “add everything to the invoice” and have someone with an infinite wallet accept it without question. For them, the increase in hourly cost translates into lower competitiveness, loss of contracts, reduction of staff, or, in the worst case, disappearance. It is precisely these companies that generate the majority of genuine employment and activity that does not depend on public works. The agreement pushes them towards the margin while protecting those who already operate under the state umbrella.
The effects do not stop at the balance sheets of the firms. Any artificial restriction on the use of working time reduces the total amount of value that society can produce. Fewer effective hours, at the same productivity, mean fewer homes, less infrastructure, less capacity to respond to demand. In the medium term, this translates into higher prices for the final consumer and fewer job opportunities for those looking to enter the sector. The immediate and visible benefit for some workers (more free time with the same income) is paid for with the invisible and diffuse cost that falls on the rest: companies that do not hire, projects that do not get done, capital that retracts.
The flexibility and countermeasures that are announced do not eliminate the underlying problem. As long as the reduction of working hours is imposed generally and without real productivity justifying it, the extra cost remains. The free market would adjust hours according to marginal productivity and the voluntary preferences of employers and workers. When that adjustment is replaced by a long-term collective agreement backed by union pressure and tripartite negotiation, a rigidity is introduced that privileges some at the expense of overall efficiency.
In summary, the preliminary agreement is not a triumph of labor justice. It is a coercive increase in the cost of labor that large companies with public contracts can dilute in the state invoice, while medium and small companies, which do not receive payments from the State, absorb the blow in their margins and their survival. The predictable result is less dynamism, greater concentration, and a transfer of costs from the private productive sector to the taxpayer. This does not strengthen construction: it weakens it.
