Minister of Labor and Social Policy Kostis Hatzidakis announced the new legislation on working hours, speaking about 4 days and 10 hours.
The changes in employment status were reported by Kostis Hatzidakis. During his speech at the meeting of the parliamentary group, he mentioned the upcoming changes in the draft law on labor. He stressed that “four days of work with ten hours are aimed at protecting the working class.”
“5 days with 8 hours of work can correspond to 4 days with 10 hours and one day off. The system will benefit employees who want to work more on some days or, for example, be able to take vacation or work less on other days. This happens without lowering wages or increasing hours of work in general.
Regulation of working time can only be carried out by a collective agreement (since it is in force today) or at the request of an employee, to combine personal and professional life, ”said the Minister of Labor.
We will remind, as “Russian Athens” wrote earlier, last year, at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the authorities were already thinking about how increase the working day to 10 hours…
A year ago, Yannis Vrucis presented to the Cabinet of Ministers five main provisions of a draft law entitled “Settlement of Labor Market Problems”, which was going to be brought up for public discussion and then submitted to parliament.
The bill included major changes to the “flexible eight-hour day”, increasing legal overtime to more than 120 hours a year, along with the introduction of an electronic strike request, parental leave for both parents and an electronic labor card.
These innovations have already caused a serious reaction, mainly from the trade unions. But, according to Vrutsis, they should lead to a change in mentality, attraction of investments and creation of jobs. The Greek Communist Party expressed its point of view on the bill.
Statement by the press service of the Central Committee of the KKE
“The government’s ugly labor bill aims to transform the entire country into a large special economic zone. Where capital will be completely tax-free, where trade union freedom will be banned and every voice fighting for labor rights will be silenced. This bill, in the literal sense of the word, will become the “shock of the century”, since for the first time in our country a 10-hour working day will be enshrined at the legislative level – 134 years after the strike in Chicago, exactly 100 years after the adoption of the first law on the 8-hour working day in Greece.
The government statement literally says: “… Companies will be able to hire workers for a maximum of 10 hours a day at no additional cost if, within the same 6 months, they compensate for overtime hours – either by reducing working hours or by providing time off or days off days … “, and also provides for” the inclusion of companies and activities in the list, which already allows you to work on Sunday. ” That is, workers, modern slaves, will be forced to work 10 hours without overtime pay for almost 6 months on the sole condition that employers give them several days off during this period.
44 years after Laskaris’s “black law”, in essence, a ban on holding a strike in the public sector, in local governments, in organizations of a legal entity of public law and in most industrial enterprises is being reintroduced.
The government bill also notes that “… registration in the already approved General Register of Trade Unions becomes a condition for the exercise of trade union rights”, i.e. the government is starting to hunt down unions by creating an open mechanism for collecting dossiers on those workers who decide to join a union. It seeks to create a list with the names of workers united in trade unions, which will be at the disposal of the ministry and the employer.
Average wages are falling, flexible forms of employment are expanding, but at the same time the role of the supreme regulatory body, in which the state and employers have a majority (Organization for Mediation and Arbitration – OMED), is increasing.
And these are just some of the crimes against workers that are being committed at the request of capital and the EU. And no amount of well-paid government propaganda can embellish them. At the same time, the time chosen by the government is not accidental. It is trying to use the outbreak of the pandemic for its own purposes, thinking that in this way it will catch workers by surprise.
It is deeply mistaken. The authors of the bill will suffer the fate of their predecessors, who tried to brick the greatest achievements of the working class in plaster cast, and eventually became the characters of satirical political cartoons. The time has come for a strike alarm – an organized popular counter-offensive! “
More Stories
AADE: What you need to know about the heating allowance credited to your energy bills
The war casts a heavy shadow on the global economy
Greek KLEEMANN elevators are supplied to hundreds of countries around the world