MADRID — Dipping into a bucket
filled with Mahou beers, Jorge Rodríguez and his friends hunkered down on a
recent Wednesday night to watch soccer at Mesón Viña, a local bar. At a nearby
table a couple were cuddling, oblivious to others, as a waitress brought out
potato omelets and other dinner orders. Then the game began. At 10 p.m.
Which is not unusual. Even as
people in some countries are preparing for bed, the Spanish evening is usually
beginning at 10, with dinner often being served and prime-time television shows
starting (and not ending until after 1 a.m.). Surveys show that nearly a
quarter of Spain’s population is watching television between midnight and 1
a.m.
“It is the Spanish identity, to
eat in another time, to sleep in another time,” said Mr. Rodríguez, 36, who had
to get up the next morning for his bank job.
Spain still operates on its own
clock and rhythms. But now that it is trying to recover from a devastating
economic crisis — in the absence of easy solutions — a pro-efficiency movement
contends that the country can become more productive, more in sync with the
rest of Europe, if it adopts a more regular schedule.
Yet what might sound logical to
many non-Spaniards would represent a fundamental change to Spanish life. For
decades, many Spaniards have taken a long midday siesta break for lunch and a
nap. Under a new schedule, that would be truncated to an hour or less.
Television programs would be scheduled an hour earlier. And the elastic Spanish
working day would be replaced by something closer to a 9-to-5 timetable.
Underpinning the proposed changes
is a recommendation to change time itself by turning back the clocks an hour,
which would move Spain out of the time zone that includes France, Germany and
Italy. Instead, Spain would join its natural geographical slot with Portugal
and Britain in Coordinated Universal Time, the modern successor to Greenwich
Mean Time.
“We want to see a more efficient
culture,” said Ignacio Buqueras, the most outspoken advocate of changing the
Spanish schedule. “Spain has to break the bad habits it has accumulated over
the past 40 or 50 years.”
For the moment, Spain’s
government is treating the campaign seriously. In September, a parliamentary
commission recommended that the government turn back the clocks an hour and
introduce a regular eight-hour workday. As yet, the government has not taken
any action.
A workday abbreviated by siestas
is a Spanish cliché, yet it is not necessarily rooted in reality. Instead, many
urban Spaniards complain of a never-ending workday that begins in the morning
but is interrupted by a traditional late-morning break and then interrupted
again by the midday lunch. If workers return to their desks at 4 p.m. (lunch
starts at 2), many people say, they end up working well into the evening,
especially if the boss takes a long break and then works late.
“These working hours are not good
for families,” said Paula Del Pino, 37, a lawyer and the mother of two
children, who said an 8-to-5 workday would ease the pressure. “Spanish society
is still old-fashioned. The ones who rule are old-fashioned, and here, they
like it like it is.”
The national schedule can be
traced to World War II, when the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco moved the
clocks forward to align with Nazi Germany, as also happened in neighboring
Portugal. After the defeat of Hitler, Portugal returned to Greenwich Mean Time,
but Spain did not.
At the time, Spain was a largely
agrarian nation, and many farmers set their schedules by the sun, not by
clocks. Farmers ate lunch and dinner as before, even if the clocks declared it
was an hour later. But as Spain industrialized and urbanized, the schedule
gradually pushed the country away from the European norm.
“People got stuck in that time,”
said Javier Díaz-Giménez, an economist. “Eventually, the clocks took over.”
In the early decades of his rule,
Franco ordered radio stations to broadcast reports of news and propaganda twice
a day to coincide with mealtimes at about 2:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. Television
arrived in the 1950s and followed the same mandate, with daily programming on
the lone government channel ending at midnight with the national anthem and a
portrait of Franco.
“Then everyone would go to bed
and procreate,” said Ricardo Vaca, chief executive of Barlovento
Communications, a media consultancy in Madrid.
By the 1990s, with Spain’s
post-Franco transition to democracy underway, television also began evolving.
Mr. Vaca said new private networks, eager for profits on popular shows, made
programs longer and pushed prime time into the early morning hours. Now, he
added, surveys show that 12 million people are still watching television at 1
a.m. in Spain.
Changing the prime-time schedule
is one of the recommendations bundled together by Mr. Buqueras, president of
the Association for the Rationalization of Spanish Working Hours. At his office
in Madrid, Mr. Buqueras burst into a conference room and immediately checked
his watch.
“Thank you for being on time!” he
declared.
Mr. Buqueras argues that changing
the Spanish schedule would be a boon to working mothers, allow families more
free time together and help Spain’s economic recovery. “If Spain had a rational
timetable, the country would be more productive,” he said.
Whether an earlier, more
regimented schedule will translate into higher productivity is a matter of
dispute. Mr. Buqueras’s group says Spanish workers are on the job longer than
German workers but complete only 59 percent of their daily tasks. Measuring
productivity is an imprecise science, and while many experts say Spanish
productivity is too low, Spain actually outperforms many European countries in
some calculations, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical
agency.
“These three-hour siestas don’t
exist,” said Carlos Angulo Martín, who oversees social analysis at the National
Statistics Institute in Madrid. Nor are habits uniform across the country, he
said, noting that in the Catalonia region, mealtimes and work schedules are aligned
more with those of other European countries.
María Ángeles Durán, a leading
sociologist with the Spanish National Research Council, is skeptical that
changing the time zone will reverse low productivity, which she attributes more
to the structure of the service-oriented economy and a lag in technology. But
she agreed that normalizing the work schedule would help women: She cited a
survey she conducted of female lawmakers in Europe, who complained that men
deliberately scheduled important meetings in the early evening when women were
under pressure to return home.
“For men, this is perfect,” Ms.
Durán said. “They arrive home and the children have already had their baths!
Timetables can be used as a sort of weapon.”
At the Mesón Viña bar, Mr.
Rodríguez and his friends contemplated the Spanish clock. One friend, Miguel
Carbayo, 26, was appalled at the notion of a nap-free lunch. He had worked as
an intern in the Netherlands, where his co-workers arrived at 8 and left at 5,
with a half-hour to munch on a sandwich for lunch, a regimen he found shocking.
“Reduce lunchtime?” he said. “No,
I’m completely against that. It is one thing to eat. It is another thing to
nourish oneself. Our culture and customs are our way of living.”
But, he admitted, a shorter nap
might be acceptable. “They say 20 minutes is enough to boost productivity,” he
said.