Consum will implement the 5-day work week in its supermarkets

The Valencian supermarket chain has decided to extend this initiative that it had launched as a pilot in several of its stores to its entire network. The goal is for the measure to be implemented across its entire network by 2024.

Consum has implemented the 5-day work week in 100 supermarkets in 2021, after conducting a pilot test in seven stores. In this way, the workforce can enjoy two days off a week, a measure that was already implemented for the workers of the logistics centers.

At the moment, more than 3,000 workers already have this new schedule. The cooperative will extend this conciliation measure to 100% of its commercial network at the beginning of 2024, to an average of more than one hundred stores per year.

The 5-day working week will benefit 95% of Consum’s workforce, who will work a maximum of 37 and a half hours a week, but will not affect business hours, which will remain the same. In addition, all supermarket workers will have a long weekend (Saturday, Sunday and Monday) every 5 weeks.

With the 5-day working week, Consum continues to improve the working conditions of the workforce, betting on the reconciliation of family and work life, a fact that reinforces its commitment to generating stable and quality employment. This measure also improves customer service, since, by being able to better reconcile family and work life, productivity and job satisfaction are favored.

In the last 6 years, Consum has created 5,938 new jobs, a figure that places the Cooperative as the largest generator of employment in food distribution in Spain in relation to its size. Consum currently has more than 17,500 workers, of which 72% are women.

Conciliation measures

Consum has been implementing conciliation measures for its workers since it was founded as a workers’ cooperative, following its Conciliation and Equality Plan, where people are at the center of all its actions, as part of its cooperative nature. Since 2015, Consum has invested 75.6 million euros in reconciliation measures.

Consum contemplates several measures related to the family, included in its Catalog “+ of 75 Measures to Reconcile” family and work life, such as extraordinary pay for

workers with disabled children, the ‘basket-voucher’ of 50 ?? per birth, the possibility of accruing vacations after maternity leave or paternity leave and being able to accumulate breastfeeding leave in 23 consecutive days.

Other policies related to births that Consum has are the recoverable one-day leave for ‘grandparents’ due to the birth of a daughter or daughter-in-law or, for premature children who require hospitalization, that parents can be absent one hour from their working day until the baby receives the medical discharge and both have the possibility of reducing the working day two more hours a day, if both work in the Cooperative.

In 2020, Consum once again obtained the Top Employers certificate, for the eighth consecutive year, as one of the best companies to work for in Spain and is the only distribution company with the Family Responsible Company certificate