The PSD/CDS government, with the support of CH and IL and made viable by the PS, is pursuing a policy at the service of big capital, heightening exploitation, dismantling public services, attacking the democratic system and jeopardising national sovereignty.
The government has announced a labour package that is a declaration of war on workers. The government, those who favour its policies and big capital are there with their goals, which have to be confronted and can be defeated.
This constitutes a violent attack on fundamental rights. This labour package aims to heighten the unsustainable situation of low wages, promote unfair dismissals, broaden precariousness and increase insecurity, further deregulate working hours, promoting unpaid work and turning into hell workers' personal and family lives, reduce the rights of mothers and fathers, the basis of effective children's rights. Alongside the direct attack on individual rights and in order to weaken them even further, it intends to attack workers' collective rights, weaken collective bargaining, jeopardise the right of reunion, intervention and trade union information, limit the right to strike, a decisive weapon for defending rights and dignity and improving living conditions.
For decades, they have been talking about the rigidity of labour legislation, trying to confuse rigidity with the protection of rights, in order to increase the power and rigidity of the instruments of destruction of rights and the deterioration of living conditions. In a situation marked by labour legislation that is unfavourable to workers, for which successive PSD, CDS and PS governments have been responsible, and which includes grievous rules that need to be repealed, this proposal of a step backwards, in the revanchist conception of the times of the troika, not only maintains strongly negative content, but intends to worsen it.
It is unacceptable, and the labour package must be confronted and defeated.
What is at stake?
When profits are huge, workers are experiencing real difficulties and a general wage increase is needed as a national emergency, they want to worsen the situation of low wages and the devaluation of professions and careers. They want to use unemployment and unemployment benefits to lower wages and, in the name of “encouraging employment”, to put public funds in place of the payment that employers have to make to workers. They are using the ruse of paying holiday and Christmas pay in twelfths to create the unrealistic feeling of more pay that they don't want to increase, while at the same time seeking to jeopardise holiday and Christmas bonuses. This is accompanied by talk of a cut in personal income tax (IRS), which has no real meaning for the overwhelming majority of workers, but which serves to evade wage rises.
In a situation in which protection against dismissal has been weakened, in which collective dismissals are used almost at will and after the brutal reduction in the value of redundancy payments, they now want to facilitate individual dismissal by establishing that even with proof in court that there is no just cause, and despite having to pay compensation, the employer could prevent the worker from being reinstated, thus consummating the dismissal. At the same time, they are seeking to limit the worker's right to challenge the dismissal in court and to repeal the mechanism for monitoring and suspending unlawful dismissal promoted by the Authority for Working Conditions (ACT).
Instead of fighting precariousness that affects so many workers, they want to extend it. They want to establish longer fixed-term contracts and new reasons for this type of contract (workers who haven't had an indefinite contract, the opening of a new business, pensioners). They want to extend the practice of subcontracting/outsourcing in order to destroy permanent jobs, removing the current ban on using this method within 12 months of redundancies. They want to make it more difficult for workers on digital platforms to be recognised as employees and to reduce the protection of workers considered to be self-employed in a situation of economic dependence, by increasing the percentage of work provided to an entity for this to be recognised from 50% to 80%. They want to facilitate the use of temporary labour and extend very short-term contracts.
When workers are subjected to highly unregulated working hours, affecting the compatibility of their professional activity with their personal and family life, and when reducing weekly working hours to 35 hours and working hours compatible with the nature of human beings is required, they want to extend the unregulated working hours. They want to turn workers' lives into a living hell, disposing of workers' time at the employers' discretion, extending working hours and targeting unpaid work, in particular by trying to resume the individual bank of hours, based on false negotiation between the worker and the company, in practice an employer's imposition and, in the context of the group bank of hours, reducing the possibility of the worker not accepting, leading to its application to all workers.
When the central objective should be living conditions, rights and the prospect of fulfilment in life, and particularly when the demographic situation means stimulating the birth rate, supporting parents and children, the government is attacking parents, particularly mothers, by limiting the right to breastfeed, the right to flexible working hours, part-time work, including the possibility of forcing workers who have children under 12 to work nights, public holidays and weekends. In addition to this attack, which is an offence to working mothers and women, there are proposals for low wages, precariousness, the law of the jungle in working hours, and also the elimination of gestational bereavement. Abandoning one or other of these shocking proposals does not remove the anti-social nature, worsening exploitation and violation of human rights that characterise this labour package.
In collective bargaining, instead of repealing the expiry and reinstating the principle of more favourable treatment for workers, they want to maintain and facilitate the expiry/extinction of collective bargaining agreements, modify the content of collective bargaining agreements with a reduction in working conditions, and extend the possibility for employers to choose the collective bargaining agreement that applies to non-unionised workers. They want to reduce the application of the principle of the most favourable treatment for the worker, further opening the trapdoor of unprotection for workers, broadening the range of matters that “collective bargaining” can establish below the rights enshrined in law, namely overtime work to further lower pay and extend working hours and teleworking to weaken rights, working conditions and compensation.
They attack the right to strike in order to limit the organised strength of workers, facilitate employers' operations to weaken rights and working conditions and make it more difficult to fight for wage increases and rights. Among the mechanisms used is the extension of the so-called minimum services to more sectors and the establishment of criteria outside of “pressing social need” with discretionary and systematic application, treating them as maximum services, when they assign, as is already the case today, more workers for minimum services than those scheduled for normal activity.
They preach democracy and social dialogue, but they make a violent attack on workers' rights to organise in their unions and to develop their intervention, on trade union freedom. They want to repeal the rights to union action, the right to meet, to intervene and to provide union information in companies where there are no known unionised workers, making the exercise of these rights dependent on the will of the employers. They also want to repeal the rule that, in small companies, allows the shop steward to call meetings.
They attack collective rights such as collective bargaining, the right to strike and trade union freedom in order to further unbalance the balance of power in favour of capital, attack the democratic regime, heighten capitalist exploitation, inequalities and injustices. Low wages, precariousness and the deregulation of working hours, which are inseparable from successive changes to labour legislation, jeopardise the Country's development, and the labour package now being presented would make the situation even worse. But it doesn't have to be like this.
The path to a fair, developed and sovereign Portugal is the rejection of the labour package, compliance with the Constitution of the Republic and the application of the rights it enshrines.
The PCP calls on workers to promote the struggle for wages, rights and working conditions, in conjunction with clarification, mobilisation, unity and struggle to confront and defeat the labour package. Unity and struggle around clear objectives. As always, the struggle will ultimately decide.
