Spain: employers and unions pave the way for the textile retail sector’s first collective agreement

This marks the end of a historical anomaly. Despite being the home of Zara and Mango, Spain’s ready-to-wear chain employees previously lacked a national collective agreement. They relied on company-level agreements and a series of highly local retail collective agreements with disparate and sometimes outdated frameworks. This created inequalities between employees within the same chain from one Spanish region to another.

Over three years of negotiations

Following years of disagreement with retail employer representatives, leaders of the sector’s major brands agreed in 2023 to form their own association—the Association Retail Textil España (ARTE)—to directly negotiate the modernisation of labour relations within their industry.