“It’s going to be a big general strike. There are many reasons for workers to join the strike, many reasons for them to stop on that day to move forward with their lives in the days following. If there were any doubts, the contact we are having here at Visteon proves it,” he stated.
Paulo Raimundo spoke after engaging with employees of Visteon, a company in Palmela that produces electrical components for automotive use, where he noticed a “lot of determined people” ready to participate in Thursday’s general strike.
“They are well aware of the struggles that have been fought, specifically in this company, preventing the implementation of the hours bank here. They know well what the employers want with the individual hours bank,” he noted.
The PCP’s secretary-general also warned about “the intensification of the work pace and the resulting occupational diseases.”
“Those who work deserve better. Those who create wealth, those who make everything function, deserve a better life and that life is not about more insecurity, more hours banks, more pressure on mothers and fathers, more pressure on wages, certainly not with dismissals for just cause,” he emphasized.
The general strike on Thursday was announced by the CGTP’s general-secretary, Tiago Oliveira, at the conclusion of the national march against the labor package on November 8.
Days later, the UGT unanimously approved the decision to advance in convergence with the CGTP, thus including the favorable vote of the Social Democratic Workers (TSD).
This will be the first strike to unite the two trade union centers since June 2013, when Portugal was under ‘troika’ intervention.
“It’s going to be a big strike, a significant response from the workers, predominantly women, to join the strike. We’ll be here on the 12th with better conditions to defeat this labor package,” he concluded.
The changes planned in the proposal presented by the Government on July 24 as a “profound” revision of the labor legislation, which envisions the revision of more than a hundred articles of the Labor Code, range from the area of parenthood (with changes in parental leave, breastfeeding, and gestational grief) to flexible work, company training, or trial period of employment contracts, also predicting an expansion of the sectors covered by minimum services in case of a strike.
