"Cancel sectoral agreements"

The Troika officials seem to continue to see the reduction of salaries in the private sector as an insurmountable obstacle.

The meeting with the leadership of the Labour Ministry entailed them calling for nothing less than abolishing sectoral agreeements in order to facilitate the implementation of specific operational contracts with lower wages.

“From December 17th, 2010, only 10 business contracts have been signed, as emphasized by the officials. After failing to make the institution practicable, remove the branch operational contracts from the picture”.

Minister of Labour Mr. I. Koutroumanis, stated:

“We can move to individual improvements to make the environment more inviting for the signing of business contracts. But we cannot mess around with institutions. There is an agreement between social partners to maintain the extension of sectoral agreements”.

The Ministry will discuss the possibility of moving forward in order to facilitate the signing of business contracts through the following “improvements”:

- An update on the data representing the partners, before any decision is made to extend the sectoral agreements towards all workers in the industry.

- There will be no requirement to submit an explanatory report on the implementation of an operational agreement to the Council of Social partners, which up until now had a say on the necessity of wage reduction.

- An acceleration of the process of establishing associations to sign business contracts to one and a half months, from the current six months.

Also discussed was the need to push forward with more checks concerning undeclared works, the plan to reduce ancillary agreements and the new list of manual labour agreements.