Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated across Spain on Sunday against the government’s radical labour reforms, and despite widespread cross-party opposition to the measures, the ruling Popular Party has adopted a defiant attitude and says it will only contemplate "minor changes" to the legislation it approved in the form of a decree earlier this month.

“What we saw [on Sunday] was not a majority response,” said María Dolores de Cospedal after emerging from this weekend’s PP congress reinforced as the party’s deputy leader.

“The PP has received a reformist mandate from an immense majority of Spaniards, and the government is determined to carry out an authentic overhaul of the labour model in this country, even though it is not popular,” she added.

De Cospedal was referring to the landslide victory the PP won in the November 20th general election, which guaranteed it an absolute majority.

The reform makes it cheaper and easier to sack workers, allowing firms to cite so-called "objective clauses", such as falling sales, to lay staff off.

The leader of the main opposition Socialist Party, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, on Monday described the reform as “unjust, unnecessary and ineffective,” and reiterated his party’s intentions to seek its complete amendment in Congress.

Members of the center-right Basque Nationalist party PNV, the centrist UPyD and the United Left also had harsh words to say about it, the latter terming it a “weapon of mass destruction of jobs and rights.”

People took to the streets en masse across Spain on Sunday to protest against the reform, whose ultimate aim, labor unions claim, is to bring down wages, but which the government insists addresses the problem of mass unemployment, making it easier and cheaper for companies to hire new staff.