By S. Papapetros
Statements by the EU Commissioner for Employment Marianne Thyssen, who spoke to Greece’s state-run news agency on Thursday, more-or-less continued to confirm that the Commission, along with Greece’s other institutional creditors, will push for widespread reforms in the country’s labor sector come autumn.
Reforms in the labor market have repeatedly been cited as the main emphasis of upcoming negotiations to conclude a second review of the Greek program (third bailout), a development that will also free up a 2.8-billion-euro sub-tranche of bailout money for Athens.
Thyssen referred to “deep reforms” in the Greek labor market, which she listed – as previous European and IMF officials have already done – as changes to the law for declaring industrial actions, the entire private sector framework, mass layoffs and combating undeclared labor.
The Belgian commissioner said the current framework in Greece discourages investments.
In Greece the definition of “mass layoffs” applies to businesses that employ more than 20 workers, and where the redundancies over a certain number every calendar month are due to “economic and technical” reasons, meaning that they are not linked, per se, to the individual worker's performance or overall presence. For instance, in a company where 100 employees are on the payroll, more than six layoffs (6 percent) in the first month are considered a mass layoff and require ministry approval.
The law applies to businesses with more than 20 employees and less than 150. The framework is slightly stricter for companies in Greece, exceedingly few, which employ more than 150 people. For the latter, 5 percent of the workforce, and up to an absolute number of 30, can be laid-off every month.
However, very few politicians, especially Cabinet members, are willing to sign-off on mass layoffs, as the political costs are enormous. Conversely, businesses that must proceed with accelerated restructuring – for instance, legally firing, compensating and rehiring the same staff at reduced pay – in order to stay afloat are often left in limbo because of the absence of a minister’s signature on their "survival" plan.
Although the current framework appears strict and employee-friendly on paper, numerous instances over the past few years have witnessed businesses, including high-profile companies, such as an Athens newspaper founded in the 1970s and a television station with more than 750 employees, simply stop functioning. Months of unpaid wages usually precede, following by strikes, work stoppages, occupation of workplaces and, finally, lawsuits and the beginning of drawn-out legal battles.
Employers' group
On its part, the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises (SEV), the biggest employers’ group, has tabled its positions, namely:
- For the European directive on mass layoffs to wholly apply in Greece as well, without the need of approval by the ministry of labor
- Changes in the framework of an independent arbitration body
- The minimum monthly salary being set through collective bargaining between ‘social partners’
- Collective bargaining to give priority to individual business-level contracts instead of sector-wide contracts
- It does not favor “lock outs”
- Changes in the legal framework governing labor union representatives and representation
