CCOO and UGT give the government until 31 July to pass time-tracking rules

Legal note: This article is for information only and does not constitute legal advice. The digital time-tracking royal decree is still working its way through approval and has not yet been published in the BOE.

The unions set a date, and a price

For months, CCOO and UGT had simply asked for the time-tracking decree to be passed “and be done with it”. On 30 June they raised the stakes. Unai Sordo and Pepe Álvarez named a date, 31 July, and attached a concrete threat: if the royal decree is not approved by then, they will stop signing agreements with the government for the rest of the legislative term.

The decree isn’t the only thing riding on that gamble. The unions bundle it with the minimum-wage rise without offset and the workplace-risk law, which remains stalled. Sordo and Álvarez framed it as a matter of credibility: if what gets signed never turns into actual rights, they warn, the trust that has held social dialogue together over these years erodes, and the next agreements become far harder to reach.

Why 31 July and not some other date

August empties the Council of Ministers. Anything that does not clear the two or three meetings left in July effectively slides to September at the earliest, and by then the political calendar has shifted. The date marks the last stretch with real room to pass the rule before the summer break.

There is a second, less visible clock. Yolanda Díaz is being floated as a candidate to lead the International Labour Organization, with nominations closing in late August. The minister pushing the decree therefore has her own incentive to get it wrapped up before she leaves, plus the risk of losing political momentum if her horizon shifts to Geneva. In both scenarios the push points toward closing the decree before summer, not shelving it until autumn.

This decree comes from the government’s plan B. Plan A, cutting the working week to 37.5 hours by law, fell in Congress for lack of support. What the executive has left are the measures it can push through by regulation, without depending on votes it does not have, and controlling working hours is the main one. The unions press here because it is the ground where the government needs no one else to act.

The obstacle hasn’t gone away

The brake has had a name since March. The Council of State issued an unfavourable opinion on the draft and raised substantive objections: that the text does not properly assess the economic impact, that it imposes obligations better suited to a law than a regulation, that it fails to distinguish between sectors with very different realities, and that worker data protection falls short.

That opinion is not binding —the government can pass the decree anyway— but it does two awkward things. It hands legal arguments to anyone who later wants to challenge the rule in court, and it has fuelled friction within the executive itself, with Labour and Economy pulling in different directions over how far to soften the text for small businesses. The union ultimatum arrives precisely to force that internal debate to close before the month runs out.

What this changes for a small business

In the short term, little. A moving approval date does not change what the decree will require, because the substance has been on the table in the draft royal decree for months: clock-ins by digital means, with the hour and minute of entry, exit and breaks; records that cannot be tampered with without leaving a trace; worker access to their own data; and inspection by the Labour Inspectorate, in the most-discussed version, remotely.

None of that can be improvised the day it appears in the BOE. A company clocking in on paper today, or on an Excel sheet anyone can edit afterwards, would have to rebuild how it records working time almost from scratch (here we explain how to comply step by step). And the gap between publication and entry into force for these rules tends to be short. Acting now is not about beating a specific date —nobody has one— but about reaching it with the problem already solved rather than the countdown bearing down.

A digital time-tracking system solves that jump ahead of time. With Cleverfy, clock-ins are stamped to the hour and minute, viewable by the worker, and ready for an inspection without reconstructing anything by hand. You can see it working before the decree makes it mandatory.

Whether the decree lands on 31 July, in September, or later depends on a political negotiation outside the company’s control. What is within reach is arriving at that date with time tracking already in order.

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Sources: Noticias Obreras (CCOO), Qué.es.

Image: Signing of the Trainee Statute (2023): Unai Sordo, Yolanda Díaz and Pepe Álvarez. © UGT, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).