- Македонски
- English
Today, the public debate on the new Law on Labor Relations continued in Shtip.
The Federation of Trade Unions of Macedonia participates in the discussions at the highest level, and this was also the case in Shtip, and today's public hearing was attended by the President of the SSM, Darko Dimovski, the Secretary of the Council of the SSM, Zlatko Cvetkovski, the vice-president of the SSM for the private sector, Ivan Peshevski, the president of SIER, Igor Gjerasov, the president of AGRO Syndicate, Igor Kitanoski, the secretary of RSP Shtip, Stojance Kashikovski, representatives from SSM and representatives of the branch unions united in SSM who highlighted the main remarks of the proposed draft solution for a new Labor Law relationships.
Unfortunately, the leaders of the other unions probably think that they should not fight for labor rights through the new Law on Labor Relations, so they do not participate in the discussion in Shtip, so if the representatives of the SSM do not point out the curtailment of labor rights, the MTSP will implement all the ideas that regress labor rights through the draft text of the Law.
The representatives of the non-governmental sector have not yet participated in meetings to give suggestions and comments, nor did they have time to sit at the public hearing today (they came, saw, apologized, and left) and fight for labor rights and left the hearing itself. start.
The Union of Trade Unions of Macedonia is the only representative union in the country and is an active participant in all discussions for the preparation of a new Law on Labor Relations since 2018.
We remind you that SSM is the only social partner that drafted a new text of the Law on Labor Relations and proposed it to the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy in February 2018.
A large part of the requirements are already part of the working version of the text of the Law on Labor Relations, but unfortunately for several key requirements and remarks, although they are still in the text, they have not been changed.
The main goal of the new law must be to advance labor rights, not to make up and return them to the level of a few years ago, or to leave again provisions that will be freely interpreted like this:
- The duration of fixed-term employment contracts, instead of being set at a maximum of one year, the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs proposes in the text that they be concluded for two years and thus, instead of improving rights, it returns them to the level 10 years ago when they were concluded for two years, although he knows that according to the latest data from the ESA and the State Statistics Office, fixed-term employment contracts are ¼ more than indefinite-term employment contracts and they were the main reason for workers' layoffs during the crisis in the past two years.
According to the requirements of the SSM from 2018 until today, fixed-term employment contracts should be an exception and up to 1 year at most, and we remind them that this is also a program determination of the SSM in the 2020-2024 program determined on page 47, point 2 (We will regulate the fixed-term employment relationship – making the fixed-term employment contract the exception, not the rule. Consequently, fixed-term employment contracts will have a maximum duration of up to 12 months with a direct transformation to open-ended after the expiry of that period.)
(the proposal of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs is that fixed-term employment contracts should be 2 years in the proposal of the Law on Labor Relations)
- The Union of Trade Unions of Macedonia reacted strongly to the intention of the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy to abolish all collective agreements in the country at all meetings so far, especially because the validity of the collective agreements and their provisions will be a maximum of 1 year and then there are no collective agreements.
In the European countries, where we jointly strive to join, the provisions of the collective agreements are valid until the signing of a new collective agreement, and only for more favorable rights, which was also presented by German experts to the representatives of MTSP and DIT, who apparently with intention they don't want to hear and they want to do damage to workers' rights with unforeseeable consequences, so from here if this legal provision changes as is the intention of MTSP or some people from there, it will happen that there will be no General Collective Agreements, that there will be no branch collective agreements and that there are no collective agreements at the employer level which regulate the rights and obligations of employers and workers and which will represent a serious problem in the normal functioning of the state which is contrary to the ratified conventions and the obligation arising from them for the Government to promote and encourages collective bargaining, and with such a provision, it will block and reverse the collective bargaining.
