UGT threatens to freeze its deals with the Government over time tracking

Legal note: This article is for information only and does not constitute legal advice. The Royal Decree on digital time tracking is still being processed and has not yet been published in the BOE (Spain’s official gazette).

UGT puts a price on its silence

On 21 September, Pepe Álvarez raised the bar. The secretary general of UGT warned that the union will “seriously” consider signing no new agreement with the Government until the time tracking reform is approved. It is a step up from the press appearances and verbal ultimatums of recent months, because this time the pressure reaches the rest of the social agenda, the minimum wage included, and ties it to a decree stalled for months finally getting off the shelf.

“This can’t go on any longer,” Álvarez said, summing up before speaking at a conference on workplace health in Madrid.

Not even the union knows where the text is

Beyond the threat, the appearance produced a confession. “We have no idea where the reform stands,” the UGT leader admitted. The union that has pushed this rule the hardest, the one that considers it “central,” admits it has lost track of the decree inside the machinery of the Labour Ministry.

Álvarez explained that Yolanda Díaz has told him the project is in “a legal adjustment process.” That adjustment means the text is still being rewritten to dodge the blow the Council of State (Spain’s senior legal advisory body) already dealt it. Álvarez himself acknowledges that those aspects need fixing, with one red line, that the rule must not lose its ability to genuinely scrutinise working hours.

Why the decree is still stuck

The holdup comes from the Council of State, which issued an unfavourable opinion on the draft at the time. It noted that the text did not properly measure the economic impact, that some obligations should be set by law rather than by regulation, that it did not fit the particularities of each sector, and that data protection for the worker fell short.

That opinion is not binding. The Government can approve the decree anyway. But it has served as an excuse to stretch out the deadlines, and it forces the Labour Ministry to rework parts of the text before sending it back to the Council of State and, after that, to the Council of Ministers (the Cabinet). Every lap around that circuit takes weeks, and the decree has been trapped in it long enough that not even UGT knows the date.

There is an underlying reason UGT is concentrating the pressure right here. Time tracking by decree was the Government’s plan B after the reduction of the working week to 37.5 hours fell through in Congress. It is one of the few labour measures the Executive can push through on its own, without seeking majorities in the chamber, which also makes it the easiest to demand.

What this changes for a small business

For a small company, the political noise is easy to dismiss as someone else’s problem. But two practical takeaways come out of this episode for any small business.

The first is that the decree will come out. When the majority union is willing to block the rest of the social agenda to force it through, the room for the rule to be shelved is very narrow. The only question left is the month of publication.

The second is that the underlying obligation already exists without any decree. Recording working hours has been mandatory since 2019, and the Supreme Court has long been striking down manual records case after case. The Labour Inspectorate fines you for not keeping records today, not on the day the BOE publishes the fine print.

Waiting for that publication before you act carries a cost paid on three fronts:

• History cannot be manufactured backwards. The Inspectorate can request data from earlier months. The sooner you start recording, the more backing you will have when they come knocking.
• Migrating at the same time as everyone else is expensive. The day the rule is published, companies still clocking in on paper will look for a provider all at once. Lead times and support get saturated.
• Clocking in properly is a habit. Getting the team used to it takes weeks, and that does not depend on any official date.

What your system will have to meet

The bar is known because it has been in the draft for a year. When the decree is published, a time tracking system will have to offer, at a minimum:

1. Digital clock-in via web, app or kiosk, no paper or spreadsheets.
2. Tamper-proof records with an audit trail of any change.
3. Exact hour and minute of clock-ins, clock-outs and breaks.
4. Remote, immediate access for the Labour Inspectorate.
5. Secure retention of the data for four years.
6. A monthly summary for each worker alongside the payslip.

You can see the full set of requirements your software must meet so you are not caught short.

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Sources: Europa Press, Noticias Trabajo.

Photo: Josep Maria Álvarez (Pepe Álvarez), UGT general secretary. Montserrat Boix, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped image.