Catalonia is working on timetable reform

Barcelona (CNA).- The Timetable Reform Initiative is a Catalan organisation created to achieve more reasonable working hours. To do so, this initiative wants to regain two hours of “jetlag” in relation to the rest of the world, promote a new time culture in companies and a return to Greenwich Meridian Time (GMT). They want to promote the change from five standpoints: employment, education, culture, administration and trade. Due to its geographic location, Spain should belong to GMT like Portugal or the United Kingdom but in 1940, after the Spanish Civil War, the dictator Francisco Franco adapted the Spanish time zone to Nazi Germany, which was an hour ahead of GMT. Now, the Catalan initiative for the time reform wants to bring the country back to Greenwich Meridian Time.

Promoters of the Timetable Reform Initiative began to work in 2014 on the project to defend more reasonable timetables in Catalonia. They did an outreach campaign about good practices in companies and administration and a Parliamentary commission was also created to study this reform. This year, it is expected that these legislative changes will begin to exist with a timetable law that considers a new organisation of time.

The Parliament has joined the pilot programme by adapting its timetable to the reform. They have also proposed the redistribution of holidays during the school year, to establish similar commercial timetables to other European countries and to bring forward prime time television.

For the president of the Timetable Reform Study Commission, Agnès Russiñol, this rationalisation is “synonymous with modernisation” and a “happier, healthier, fairer and more equal society”.

Last week, the Commerce Confederation of Catalonia’s general secretary, Miquel Àngel Fraile, said that shopkeepers in Catalonia are willing to join a “D-Day” to mark the start of the time reform. Fraile has argued that this social change “cannot be done in isolation” in the economic sector, but that the whole society must do it at all once, as happened with the entering into force of VAT or with the beginning of the euro circulation.

Fraile recalled that traders are a “key element” of time reform, and on the profitability of the businesses, he indicated that there are countries like the UK and Germany, among others, which have more rational schedules and remain competitive economies. “It is about adapting ourselves in order not to have more opening hours”, he said.

In this way, many restaurants in Prats de Lluçanès, a village in the province of Barcelona, decided to bring forward their opening hours a few weeks ago with a pilot programme that proposes that restaurant owners advance the opening hours of their establishments so as to have breakfast, lunch and dinner earlier. The owner of the restaurant Cal Quico, Josep Maria Plaixens, has joined the initiative “because it positively affects the organisation of the restaurant” and although customers are still “mentally used to eating late”, by half-past one in the afternoon three diners had already been attracted by the initiative.