“The Government is tightening the noose on workers, and we call for a great cry of indignation that can take to the streets to prevent this law from being approved,” stated BE leader Joana Mortágua during a statement at the party’s headquarters in Lisbon, addressing the Government’s proposal to amend labor laws.
Joana Mortágua asserted that everyone has “the duty to fight against this law” proposed by the PSD/CDS-PP Government, which she described as a “submissive package to the worst employers,” those who view Portugal as a country of “miserable wages” and export “their best workforce to later depend on a highly exploited and very cheap labor force.”
“This labor package is a betrayal to any notion of modernity for the country’s economy or any promise of modernity for the nation. The Bloc warned during the campaign that this Government would implement a vendetta against workers’ rights, but what has been presented is much more than a regression,” she criticized.
According to the former BE deputy, this law “directly attacks wages and working hours” and aims for workers to “work more hours for less pay.”
“It is a law made against the young, creating second-class workers, a generation of employees who, never having had a stable contract, are told they will never have one,” she lamented.
Joana Mortágua claimed that “what the Government tells all the young people of this country” is that, after “having robbed the right to housing,” now they will also lose “the right to stable employment, access to credit, a normal life, and to have a family.”
“It is a Government that has given up on the youth and offering them a better future,” she condemned.
According to the BE leader, this is “an unjust law that attacks families and women.”
When questioned about recent statements by the Minister of Labor regarding alleged abuses and frauds in breastfeeding, Joana Mortágua considered them “cruel statements, as the entire labor package is cruel.”
“Look at the issue of maternity leave and the absurd statements of the minister, but also consider the entirety of the package. Removing the criminalization of undeclared domestic work, when we know there are hundreds of thousands of women earning below the minimum wage who, without this law, likely have no right to social protection, retirement, or benefits in case of illness,” she criticized.
In an interview over the weekend with TSF and Jornal de Notícias, the Minister of Labor, Solidarity and Social Security, Maria do Rosário Palma Ramalho, stated that some mothers abuse the right to breastfeeding leave and found it difficult to understand why children older than two years need breastfeeding during work hours.
The draft labor legislation reform, which, according to the Government, involves revising “over a hundred articles of the Labor Code,” has been presented to social partners and will be negotiated within the scope of Social Concertation.
