“The law that is in force has some imbalance in favor of workers.”
Let us imagine that these words, spoken by Maria do Rosário Palma Ramalho, the Minister of Labor, in interview with RTP on November 26thhad been said by Luís Montenegro during the 2024 or 2025 legislative campaigns, thus announcing that he intended to review the Labor Code to put an end to such an “imbalance”.
Let’s imagine that Luís Montenegro had explained why he believed this imbalance existed in the Labor Code (which, remember, has the function of safeguarding workers’ rights) and how he would “rebalance” it.
That he had announced, for example, that he wanted to end the ban on companies can resort to outsourcing immediately after carrying out a collective dismissal. In other words: I wanted to allow more expensive workers to be fired wholesale and replace them, through subcontracting, with cheaper ones.
Who had the desire to “simplify” disciplinary processes with a view to individual dismissal (ending the process and leaving only dismissal) e revoke the obligation, if the worker appeals to the Labor Court and proves that he was dismissed without just cause, of reinstatement of the worker in the company that illegally dismissed him.
In other words, that Luís Montenegro would have admitted, as the unsuspecting Bagão Félix (a centrist who was minister of supervision between 2022 and 2004, in the government of Durão Barroso, and who approved the first Labor Code) said in statements to Express this fridayto be its objective is to liberalize illegal dismissals.
Let us imagine that, as a candidate for prime minister, Montenegro would have assumed that it was his desire that companies would be able to lower workers’ salaries by assigning them a position different from the one they heldgiving the Working Conditions Authority 30 days to comment, after which tacit approval would be assumed.
And even though I wanted overtime could be paid on days off and not in salary and that term contracts could be extended from the current initial six months to one year, with renewals increasing from up to two years to three years.
Do you see the idea? And he said that all this was necessary to “increase productivity” and to “modernize” the labor market, “adapting it” to the “digital era” and “the 21st century”, and that he could not understand why the workers’ representatives — the unions — were protesting and promising to fight.
Are you imagining what would happen? If they are not, you can be sure that Luís Montenegro imagined it.
Reason why this “reform” which he now extols as absolutely fundamental, which his Minister of Labor asserts is as much hers as the Prime Minister’s, and which the Minister of Economy proclaimed this Monday, on SIC-N, that he cannot stop, has never been, even lightly, addressed or revealed by him in campaign speeches, in debates or in electoral programs.
No AD program for 2025 legislative electionsregarding the amendment of the Labor Code, we only read this platitude: “Simplification of the labor code through rationalization of the pleadings, focused on reducing context costs, thus ensuring greater implementation and understanding of the rules by the parties”.
“Rationalization of the pleadings”, ahah. Everything in the program was so smooth, passing by: “Modernize the rules to confront market segmentation and adjust to changes in the world of work”; “potentiate the stable labor relationso investment of the parties in the employment relationshipand so on effective integration of workers”. Everything always, it should be noted, in accordance with the strict “will of the worker”: “Flexible framework for transition between durations of the normal weekly working period, even if temporary, with possible percentage adjustment of remuneration, allowing lighter contact with the labor market when this is desired and at the exclusive initiative of the worker”; “reinforcement of the possibility of transition, even if temporary, between working time regimes and the possibility of remote work by agreement between the parties”.
Just a little different from the proposal now presented and to which even Bagão Félix calls it “rough”. The same as that which the social democrat Silva Peneda, who was Cavaco Silva’s Minister of Labor, believes, in mentioned piece of Expressof “unbalanced” and “untimely”, seeing nothing in it that “is related to increasing productivity or competitiveness” nor, for that matter, addressing “the needs of modern times: digitalization, artificial intelligence, computing”.
In fact, for another specialist in the area, António Monteiro Fernandes, a university professor who is seen as an “indispensable figure in Labor Law” and was Secretary of State for the supervision in the first Guterres Government, also in statements to Express,“These changes are from the 20th century, they have nothing to offer the 21st century”.
In addition, jurists Guilherme Dray and Ana Teresa Ribeiro assure the same weekly that, with regard to workers on digital platforms, the rules that the government wants to enforce will make it “practically impossible for a court to recognize that a courier or Uber driver is an employee and has the right to the job”.
It is not, as we can see, necessary to give the floor to trade unionists, or even to people on the left, to conclude that the objective of the changes to the Labor Code is only one: to remove rights and guarantees from workers, unbalancing the law (even more) towards the employers’ side.
And that, having hidden this agenda when presenting itself for elections, the coalition chaired by Montenegro waited, in silence, for the right moment. Or an absolute majority or something more similar: a possible majority with a Liberal and Enough Initiative and conditions to pass something that, you know, would never be able to convince voters to approve.
It is for this reason that the best argument in favor of the urgency and legitimacy of this Thursday’s general strike, the general strike that he and his government have tried so hard to present as meaningless, comes from Luís Montenegro and his PSD: If they hadn’t known that they could only carry out this reform by deceiving Portuguese workers, they wouldn’t have hidden it so carefully.