Airbus Spain workers reject telework offer and begin indefinite strike
Airbus workers in Spain began an indefinite strike on Tuesday 25 August, after assemblies at five sites rejected the company’s mediated offer the previous day. Workers at Getafe (Madrid), San Pablo and Tablada (Seville), Illescas (Toledo) and Albacete voted the offer down across both morning and afternoon shifts on 24 August. The Cádiz assembly was deferred to 1 September. Pickets began at 05:30 on the Tuesday, with around 14,000 employees called out and the unions CGT, UGT and ÚTIL reporting participation of roughly 90%.
The rejected offer was tabled on 21 August through Spain’s SIMA mediation service and included a restoration of two telework days a week alongside existing individual arrangements, pay rises linked to inflation plus an increment intended to recover lost purchasing power, and the withdrawal of Airbus’s Supreme Court appeal over sick-pay supplements with deducted amounts refunded. Workers rejected it because the pay commitments carried no figures or dates, and because holidays, working-time flexibility, canteen and transport terms were left unresolved. The unions are seeking cumulative pay rises of 9% across 2026 and 2027. Talks resumed the same day under the daily calendar agreed at SIMA.
Why this matters
Airbus had already conceded the telework point. On 21 August it suspended its plan to require white-collar staff on-site four days a week from September, and the mediated offer put the two home-working days back on the table – yet the workforce still voted to strike. For remote and hybrid workers in Europe, that shows how home-working days now move through bargaining: they are traded inside a package covering pay, sick pay, holidays and transport, rather than settled on their own. If you work under a Spanish collective agreement, your telework days are a bargaining item with a price attached, and the negotiating position on pay will shape what happens to them.
Context
Spain regulates distance working through Ley 10/2021, which requires a written agreement covering the hours and conditions of remote work and makes changes to it a matter for agreement rather than unilateral instruction. That backdrop is part of why the four-day mandate met organised resistance. The direction elsewhere in Europe has generally been towards more office attendance – Norway’s DNB has ended fixed work-from-home days, and ABN AMRO in the Netherlands is bargaining for a 50% office-attendance floor through its collective labour agreement.
What to watch
Whether any settlement fixes the two telework days in the collective agreement, or leaves them as a management concession that can be revisited later.
Update, 3 September 2026
The strike continues. In assemblies on Monday 31 August, 81.2% voted against suspending it, with 16.4% in favour and 2.4% abstaining. Around 1,000 people voted, out of roughly 15,000 Airbus staff in Spain, so this is the position of those who attended rather than a ballot of the whole workforce. Albacete and Cádiz did not vote and agreed to follow the majority.
The offer they rejected committed to keeping the existing telework agreement intact, with its current cap of 40% of working time away from the site, alongside pay indexed to inflation and a 7.6% purchasing-power recovery running to 2030. The pay package carried the 2030 horizon; the telework commitment was to preserve the existing arrangement, with no end date stated.
A further SIMA mediation on 1 September closed without agreement, with Airbus declining to negotiate substance while the strike runs. On 2 September the company declared that table closed and said it would put an improved offer to the non-striking unions, CCOO, SIPA and ATP, on Thursday 3 September, while calling for a single negotiating table. The three striking unions are CGT, UGT and ÚTIL.
The dispute began on 1 July, when Airbus sought to reduce telework from two days a week to one.