PM works on delivering “minimum services” in all strike situations
Staying absolutely true to his word following the misery of nationwide train strikes during the election campaign, prime minister Luís Montenegro has said that he is “getting together with social partners” to revisit labour legislation.
Among the clauses to be given special attention will be those pertaining to strike law, with the aim of enshrining minimum services that guarantee “greater proportionality” between rights, the PM stressed..
“We want this change to ensure that, on all occasions, there are minimum services that do not jeopardise the proportion between the exercise of the right to strike and the exercise of the other rights of other workers,” he said, at the end of the meeting of the Permanent Committee for Social Dialogue.
Whatever emerges will be “still subject to negotiation and dialogue with partners (…) And the objective we intend to achieve is to have a legislative solution that guarantees greater proportionality between the exercise of rights and that guarantees that in those circumstances where minimum services, due to legal vicissitudes, are not possible, they can be provided to guarantee this proportion”, the leader of the government added.
“The Prime Minister responded only briefly to a question about the strike law, leaving the room while being questioned about matters relating to his income tax return”, Lusa continues.
But his stance is everything that Mr Montenegro promised when it became clear that rail unions were essentially holding the government (and the economy) to ransom by stopping hundreds of thousands of commuters from being able to travel to work.
In many ways, the crippling rail strike during the election campaign in May may well have been behind the reason for so many habitual Socialist voters putting their ‘X’s against a different party at the ballot box. ND
