In 1984, just two years after the first democratic elections were held after almost 40 years of dictatorship, the Mayor of Barcelona proposed Barcelona as the host city for the 1992 Olympic Games.

In 1986, the same year in which Spain entered the European Union, it was publicly announced that Barcelona had been chosen to host the future 1992 Olympic Games. This bid included ambitious development projects for the city, such as the plan to open the city to the sea by redeveloping the port area and decentralizing the financial districts, in what was expected to be a major urban transformation that had been decades in the making.

Spanish legislation still needed to renew itself and leave the dictatorship’s laws behind after the approval of the Spanish Constitution in 1978. Two years later, the workers' statute was published, in 1981 divorce was approved, and in 1985 the law on freedom of union association was implemented, yet many matters to regulate and adapt to European and democratic standards still remained.

The most significant legislative change that took place after the Barcelona Olympic Games—during the construction of which, 12 employees died, 3 were seriously injured, and 48 were slightly injured—was the entry into force of Act 31/1995, of 8 November, on the Prevention of Occupational Risks as provided in EU Directives, in conjunction with the labor reform of 1994.

The positive impact of the Games on employment in Spain

The Games were also conceived as a great opportunity to promote the city internationally, to open the region to economic investment and to recover the image of a cosmopolitan city that had been lost in previous decades.

In terms of economic development, the Games had a huge influence on the city. The Games prompted the acquisition of new staff and equipment, construction and refurbishment of venues, development of high-security services and communications, accommodation for the Olympic family, and services for tourists and visitors, all of which would massively help the city’s much-needed renewal. In addition, the Games would greatly improve the quality of life in Barcelona, bringing new or renovated sports facilities, medical centers, and other services to the city.

Barcelona's economy immediately saw the economic benefits of the years of preparation for the Games. A year before the Games began, unemployment in the city had almost halved from 21.3% to 13.7%, while the Spanish national figures were 21% and 15.8%, respectively.

The crisis of the 1990s and its impact on Spain after the Olympic Games

Since the early 1990s, however, the world economy had been showing signs of cooling. Those tremors, however, were slow to reach Spain, as the enormous public investments earmarked for the 1992 celebrations acted as a firewall.

After the excesses came the undertow, and already in the last quarter of 1992 our GDP contracted by 1.1% and inflation soared.

On May 13, 1993, known in Spain as Black Thursday, not even a year after the end of the Barcelona Olympics, the government was forced to devalue the Spanish currency at the time, the peseta, by 8%. Moreover, the Labor Force Survey revealed that the national economy had lost 750,000 jobs compared to the previous year, the highest unemployment rate in the whole of the EU.

Legislative news and labor reforms after the Olympic Games in Barcelona

As a result, the Spanish government enacted a series of measures and reforms to combat the crisis in which Spain was plunged after the 1992 Olympic Games. The employment structure that had been in place up to that point relied heavily on fixed-term contracts and Spain was suffering from temporariness, turnover, and precariousness in employment.

On April 3, 1992, in an attempt to alleviate the employment situation in Spain, Royal Decree-Law 1/1992 on Urgent Measures to Promote Employment and Unemployment Protection was passed. This law put in place emergency measures to strengthen active employment policies by providing incentives for the permanent hiring of those groups with particular difficulties in finding work, providing greater training for the unemployed, and rationalizing expenditure on unemployment protection.

Two years later in 1994, a labor reform was introduced that included the following changes in employment law:

• The extension of the reach of Collective Bargaining, especially in matters of working conditions.
• The reduction of the legal justifications for fixed-term employment.
• The increase in the permissibility for individual dismissal on business grounds without administrative authorization and the simplification of the procedure and reduction of the processing time for collective dismissals.
• The authorization of non-licensing Private Employment Agencies and the legalization of Temporary Employment Agencies.
• Flexibility and greater opportunities for the use of part-time contracts.
• The approval of the consolidated text of the General Social Security Law that included the legislation passed on this matter in 1990, 1992 and 1993.

And finally, in 1995 the Act on the Prevention of Occupational Risks was approved, providing that the protection of the employee against occupational hazards required companies to take actions that go beyond mere formal compliance with a predetermined set of company duties and obligations.

We can see how the years surrounding the Barcelona Olympic Games were very significant for the development of labor regulations in Spain, a newborn democracy that had just been welcomed into the European Union, and had suffered the crisis of the 1990s in a very particular way due to the impact the Games had on the country's economy. All of these events led to a series of reforms and regulatory changes, several of which are still in force today.