Consum has reduced the working week of supermarkets by one day and has extended this measure to a hundred more stores, in addition to many others in which it was already implemented in October 2021. Currently, more than 6,230 workers already enjoy two days rest per week. The cooperative plans to extend this measure to its entire commercial network at the beginning of 2024.
The five-day working week will benefit 95% of the Consum staff, who will work a maximum of 37 and a half hours per week, but will not affect business hours, which will remain the same. In addition, all supermarket workers will have a long weekend (Saturday and Sunday) every five weeks.
With the five-day working week, Consum continues to improve the working conditions of the workforce, committed to reconciling work and family 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 work and family life, productivity and job satisfaction are favored. Currently, Consum has more than 18,200 workers, of which 73% are women.
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. In 2021, Consum invested 28.3 million euros in conciliation measures, 25% more than in the previous year.
Consum contemplates several measures related to the family, included in its Catalog of “75 Measures to Reconcile” family and work life, such as the extraordinary payment for workers with children with disabilities, the ‘basket voucher’ of fifty euros per birth, the possibility of accumulating vacations after maternity leave or paternity leave and being able to accumulate nursing leave for 23 consecutive days.
In January 2022, the cooperative applied a salary increase for its operational staff (salesperson, store operations manager, preparer, machinist and administrative staff) between 1.7% and 2.5% depending on the professional category, applying a retributive solidarity measure. This increase affected 89% of the Cooperative’s workforce, some 16,408 people, and represented an investment of more than 7.5 million euros. The average remuneration of the partner operational staff amounts to €1,852.13 gross per month.
In 2021, Consum once again obtained the Top Employers certificate, for the ninth 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, with the rating of Excellence.