Implementing Spanish Equal Employment Policies in Austerity Times

The aim of this paper is to study the implementation of equal employment policies in Spain. Policy implementation in this issue is not just a domestic, but also an EU matter. EU directives on equal pay and equal treatment at work have pushed Spain to implement equal employment policies, and, before the economic crisis hit Europe in 2008, Spain had shown a good record of policy transposition into national legislation. In the fields selected for this study, equal treatment in employment and reconciliation of work and family life policies, Spain has transposed the EU directives through the adoption, respectively, of the Equality law 3/2007 and the Reconciliation law 39/1999. However, austerity policies enacted in the EU and Spain have put pressure on Spain to cut public budgets, with detrimental consequences for the implementation of gender equality policies. In the context of such opposite pressures, this paper will explore the extent to which the adopted laws are implemented in Spain. It will study implementation, firstly, through the analysis of case law in EU and Spanish courts, by inquiring the ways in which jurisprudential argumentation has interpreted the EU and national legislation on gender equality in employment. Secondly, it will include administrative memos, parliamentary debates, and budgets from a period (2000-2015) that ranges from before the economic crisis to nowadays, to assess challenges and resistances to gender equality policy implementation that arise in the context of austerity politics. Legal hermeneutics of texts, content and frame analysis of policy documents along with interviews to key actors will be the main techniques employed. The paper argues that while the EU directives on equal employment have offered means to apply gender equality in Spanish judicial practice, austerity politics in response to the economic crisis has blocked implementation in the field of gender equality in employment.