“On December 11, public sector nurses will protest against the Collective Bargaining Agreement proposed by the Ministry of Health, which aims to save money at the expense of nurses,” states the Portuguese Nurses’ Union (SEP) in a statement.
The union claims the proposal “imposes a time bank and adaptability, and no longer considers the time allocated for the transmission of information of hospitalized patients as effective work time.”
Furthermore, the SEP notes that the proposal “hinders career progression, eliminates the additional payment for night, weekend, and holiday work (‘hazardous hours’), and worsens the already challenging balance between personal and professional life.”
According to the SEP, “the severity” of the proposed changes to labor legislation, known as the Labor Package, also demands that “nurses from public, private, and social sectors join all workers in rejecting it.”
“The Government’s proposal to fundamentally change the labor legislation, without electoral support, can only be seen as retaliatory against an improvement, albeit insufficient, made under the Decent Work Agenda,” it emphasizes.
Among the most detrimental measures included in the labor package, the SEP highlights the facilitation of dismissals by removing reinstatement in cases of unlawful dismissal, and the precariousness of job relations by relaxing fixed-term contracting rules, potentially never securing a permanent contract for the worker.
It also points out “the deregulation of working hours and the expansion of individual time banks, the attack on the right to strike, the weakening of union action, as well as the reduction of maternity and paternity rights and the diminishing of guarantees in collective bargaining.”
The general strike was announced on the 8th by CGTP’s Secretary-General, Tiago Oliveira, at the end of the national march against the labor package, which brought thousands of workers to Avenida da Liberdade in Lisbon to protest the government’s proposed changes.
On Thursday, UGT unanimously approved the decision to proceed in convergence with CGTP, including the favorable vote of the Social-Democratic Workers (TSD).
This will be the first strike to unite the two union centrals since June 2013, when Portugal was under the intervention of the ‘troika’.
