Yolanda Díaz Pérez - Deputy prime minister, Spain

The leftwing minister’s government has pioneered a workers’ rights bill like the UK’s and there is nothing for Labour to fear, she tells Heather Stewart

- Heather Stewart

Spain's leftwing deputy prime minister, Yolanda Díaz Pérez, has a message for Labour politicians as the UK government's employment rights bill takes its next step to becoming law this week: take heart from our success.

With business groups in the UK issuing dire warnings about the impact of the workers' rights package, Díaz, the minister of labour and social economy, remembers her own government's battle when it thrashed out radical labour laws that came into force in 2022. “We went through nine months of hell, literally. We had the press against it, academia, research centres - everybody was saying this was going to contribute to unemployment and not eradicate it,” she recalls.

Instead, the legislation reduced Spanish companies’ use of temporary contracts significantly, without causing unemployment to jump - despite the fact that the minimum wage was increasing sharply over the same period.

“In just six months the impact was immediately positive,” Díaz says, speaking by video link from her Madrid office. “The message that I send to your government, to the unions, to [businesses], is that it is worth doing things differently.”

Spain’s unemployment rate has declined, from 14% at the start of 2022 to 11% at the end of last year (though it is still more than twice the level in the UK). The government has also made a positive argument for migration, by contrast with Labour in the UK, which has lambasted the Conservatives for running an “open border experiment”.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in its annual assessment of Spain’s economy for 2024 that “the labour market performance has been exceptionally strong”.