The UGT management and the Minister of Labor will meet this Tuesday, 16th, to resume negotiations on the package of changes to labor legislation, in the first bilateral meeting between the two parties after last week’s general strike.
The meeting is scheduled for 5 pm, at the Ministry of Labor, Solidarity and Social Security, in Lisbon, with statements from the minister, Rosário Palma Ramalho, expected at the end of the meeting, according to official information from the ministry.
Representing the General Union of Workers (UGT) are the general secretary, Mário Mourão, and the president, Lucinda Dâmaso, according to official information from the union center.
The UGT, which called the general strike on December 11th together with the CGTP, contests some measures in the draft reform, alleging that the changes to the Labor Code foreseen in the “Work XXI” plan promote more precariousness, facilitate dismissals, deregulate working hours and attack collective bargaining and the right to strike.
In the balance of the strike, the general secretary stated that the workers’ adherence to the protest represented “a resounding no that follows the resounding no already given by the UGT and its unions” and said he hoped that the executive would know how to interpret the signals left by society that day.
After calling the meeting with the UGT, the Minister of Labor rejected going back to “square one” in reforming the legislation. In an interview with RTP Madeira, Rosário Palma Ramalho demonstrated openness to taking UGT’s contributions into consideration, saying that the draft is “a working basis and not a finished thing”, but stressed that solutions must be found “halfway”.
“The Government, obviously, is not willing to go back to square one, because it presented this preliminary project legitimized by the electoral program, the Government program and even by the tripartite agreement it signed last year with the Social Concertation, including with the UGT, and which provided for us to review labor legislation”.
When calling the general strike for December 11th, the UGT justified the protest by saying that the labor package is “unbalanced, regressive and harmful to those who work”, presenting three reasons for saying so.
The central maintained that the reform “reflects a clear option in favor of employers, increasing the unilateral power of companies in areas such as individual time banking, fixed-term hiring, dismissals, ‘outsourcing’, parenting or professional training”, said that it “weakens workers and union action, affecting collective bargaining, the exercise of the right to strike and the intervention of unions in the workplace” and considered that it “ignores priorities” such as salaries, migration and housing policies.
Last week’s general strike was the first called by the CGTP and UGT for 12 years, having affected sectors such as transport, schools, hospitals and health centers, among other private companies such as Autoeuropa.
Both UGT and CGTP stated that the strike had massive participation, unlike the Government, which, in the voice of the Minister of the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro, considered the level of participation “insignificant, particularly in the private and social sector”.
The CGTP claims that more than three million workers participated, but the Minister of Labor, in an interview with RTP Madeira, said that the official data “does not correspond, in any way, to the numbers that the union centrals put forward”.