The first deputy mayor of the Barcelona City Council, Jaume Collboni, has assured that Barcelona will be prepared from a commercial point of view to “take full advantage” of the recovery of tourism after the pandemic. Collboni stated this in the presentation of the social agreement for the city’s shops to open on Sundays during the summer months in the areas with the highest tourist influx in the city of Barcelona. The agreement has been signed by the Barcelona Comerç Foundation, Barcelona Oberta, PIMEC Comerç, Foment del Treball, the National Association of Large Distribution Companies (ANGED) and UGT, and as Collboni explained, also himself, as first deputy mayor, because the City Council will monitor compliance.
“Barcelona will be prepared from a commercial point of view so that when the tourism sector starts, the commercial sector can take full advantage of it and can create jobs in the city, Collboni stressed that he has estimated at “hundreds or thousands” the jobs that the commercial opening will generate on Sunday. The signing ceremony of this agreement on business hours, “historic”, “consensual” and “unprecedented in the city and in Spain”, in the words of the socialist deputy mayor, was initially scheduled for the afternoon but was postponed due to the need to clarify the interpretation of some literalities of the document, as explained.
The agreement extends the delimitation and the days of commercial opening of the zone of great tourist influx (ZGAT), the center of the city, so that commercial establishments may open on Sundays and holidays from noon to eight in the evening, between May 15 and September 15, until December 31, 2025, when a new regulation should be approved.
In plenary on Friday
Participated in the presentation representatives of all the signatories of the social agreement, to which the CCOO is expected to join once the bodies of this union ratify its incorporation. Representing the social part, the head of the commerce and department stores sector, Betty Costa, pointed out that the union’s responsibility was clear to activate jobs lost with the covid and that the agreement did not eliminate the voluntariness of work on Sunday and work on Sunday was compensated with Saturdays and diets.
After this social agreement, the municipal government will submit it to the plenary session on Friday, February 25, to propose that Barcelona be classified as a tourist municipality with these new territorial and time specifications by the Directorate of Commerce of the Generalitat, which is the competent body for regulate this matter. The ERC group, the largest opposition group, has criticized the announcement of the agreement to extend business hours in tourist areas of the city because “it implies a paradigm shift.”
The agreement of last May
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However, the Republicans have valued the efforts of the agents and “the fact that they have reached an agreement that reduces the initial claims of the municipal government, both at a territorial and temporal level”, since in May of last year the BComú and PSC governments endorsed an agreement between the Barcelona Comerç Foundation and Barcelona Oberta that proposed the same schedule of openings but throughout the city. For ERC, the commercial opening on summer Sundays in the tourist areas of Barcelona “may have negative impacts on local businesses and in some city neighborhoods, and on conciliation and gender equity in a sector where the vast majority of workers are women”. In addition, according to the Republicans, it can generate “concentration of trade in large commercial areas and worse working conditions for workers in the world of commerce”.
Regarding this position of the Republicans, Collboni has expressed his conviction that the proposal for the application of the area of great tourist influx will go ahead in Friday’s plenary session due to the level of consensus and because ERC has responsibility for the trade area of the Generalitat. In this sense, he has pointed out that the Directorate of Commerce, in the hands of ERC, has participated in the process that has led to the agreement, so “if your political group -in the Barcelona City Council- does something else [no apoyar la propuesta en el pleno] They’ll explain it.”