Collective Bargaining

Meat inspectors at the Food Standards Agency (FSA) are to stage two four-hour strikes in a row over pay. The move follows a ballot earlier this month, voted by 63% in favour of strike action, over an imposed pay offer of 0.75%. Trade union Unison, which represents around 500 employees involved in the dispute, warned that industrial action could hit meat supplies to supermarkets and butchers. The union is seeking an above-inflation pay increase it says would begin to make up some of the 15% that has been lost from the pay of FSA staff since the coalition government came to power.
English: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/20/fsa-meat-inspectors ...
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/aug/12/meat-hygiene-inspectors-vets ...

The government's decision to significantly reduce social security contributions for new self-employed workers has encouraged thousands of people to work for themselves. Over 267,000 people have particularly embraced a measure that allows them to pay €53 a month for half a year, compared with the regular rate of nearly €260. Discounts go down to 50% and 30% of the regular rate after that. The government also established that self-employed workers no longer have to pay the state the VAT they charge their clients until they have in fact been paid for their services. Despite these reforms, the overall number of self-employed workers has been declining since the crisis began, and is now 14% lower than it was before 2008.
English: http://elpais.com/elpais/2014/08/20/inenglish ...

Trade union GMB has described an offer of compensation for blacklisted construction workers as grossly inadequate (reported since August 2012: see our archive www.cbnarchive.eu. Eight firms who set up the compensation scheme have urged workers in Scotland employed in construction up to 2009 to contact them. The scheme offers payments between œ4,000 and œ100,000. The firms have appealed for anyone whose name appeared on a file which was held by a company called the Consulting Association to contact them. The file was seized as part of an investigation into blacklisting by the Information Commissioner's Office. The names in the file were mainly those of construction workers. They have been denied work for years as a result of being blacklisted for union activities or raising health and safety concerns.
English: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics ...
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/union-attacks-low-payouts ...

Based on its fifth European Working Conditions Survey Eurofound has analysed several aspects of working conditions. The resulting report aims to identify occupations and groups of individuals experiencing relatively lower levels of earnings, job and career prospects, poor working time and intrinsic job quality. Workers in mid-skilled manual and low-skilled occupations do quite poorly when it comes to earnings, prospects and intrinsic job quality, and they report relatively low levels of both physical and mental well-being. However, their working time quality is generally good. In contrast, workers in high-skilled occupations do relatively well on almost all job quality indicators, except working time.
English: http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/publications ...

In the first sixth months of 2014, a person in paid employment earned on average 1,527.72 euro gross per month, which is 1.0% more in nominal terms and 0.4% more in real terms than in the same period in 2013. Average monthly net earnings in the first half of 2014 amounted to 999.06 euro; compared to the same period in 2013 earnings increased by 0.8% in nominal and 0.2% in real terms. The registered unemployment rate amounted to 12.8% - 0.2 of a percentage point lower than in the previous month - and it remained the same as in June 2013. The registered unemployment rate decreased the most among young people aged 15-29 years, by 0.7 percentage points. But youth unemployment is with 21.7% still very high.
English: http://www.stat.si/eng/novica_prikazi ...
http://www.stat.si/eng/novica_prikazi ...

Improvement of the pay for teachers will remain one of the most burning issues in education for the months to come. The teachers trade unions intend to hold talks on the matter not only with newly appointed education minister but also with the finance, interior and labour ministers. The unions want to discuss new measures and are of the opinion that talks with the education minister alone won't suffice. The labour minister has a say on the salary rates of non-teaching employees and the interior minister has under his remit district offices that run bilingual secondary schools and specialised schools.
English: http://spectator.sme.sk/articles/view/54985/10/teachers_want_to_discuss_salary ...

In recent weeks two trade unions representing workers who operate in the oil industry have settled pay deals (see also our June Newsletter). Trade union SAFE came to an agreement with oil service companies, calling off a strike that would have affected a unit of Baker Hughes. Some 89 oil workers would have walked off the job if the talks had failed. In addition to the union members at Baker Hughes, the deal will cover those working at oil service firms Schlumberger, Oceaneering NCA and Vetco Gray, a part of General Electric Co, the Norwegian Oil and Gas Association said in a statement. The agreement is identical to an agreement on pay reached by the other trade union Industri Energi and the Norwegian Oil and Gas Association in July 2014. Collective agreements cover about 6,000 workers employed at oil service firms.
English: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/17/norway-oil-strike ...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-06/norwegian-oil-services-strike-averted ...

Although a Constitutional Court ruling in 2011 required the government to revise the most contentious provisions of the Media Law (such as the requirement for journalists to reveal their sources), other elements, such as the powers of the politically-appointed Media Council still exist. According to Open Society Foundations (OSF), the Council has a mandate to interfere with editorial decision-making. The OSF report claims that the power of the National Media and Infocommunications Authority, the broadcast media arm of the Media Council, is `absolute' and `unprecedented in other European democracies.' For a while civil society organisations were able to create some `breathing space' for independent journalists, trapped between government pressure and profit-oriented investors. Modified labour legislation, adopted four years ago, has further weakened the bargaining power of journalists' union.
English: http://www.equaltimes.org/independent-journalism-under ...

The Constitutional Court struck down a government measure that would impose a levy on better-off pensioners, and rejected part of another piece of legislation that would impose pay cuts on public sector employees on more than €1,500 a month in the years to come. In the rulings, the court declared constitutional the cuts in public sector salaries this year and next, but said that continuing to apply these cuts in the following three years - even if they were progressively smaller - is unconstitutional. In the case of the separate bill to create a 'sustainability contribution' - a permanent levy of between 2% and 3.5% on pensions over €1,000 a month - the court ruled that most was unconstitutional.
English: http://www.theportugalnews.com/news/court-rejects-pension-levy-cuts ...

The statistical office came with detailed figures, based on Labour Force Survey data. The unemployment rate decreased by 1.2 percentage points in the 2nd quarter of 2014 (against the 1st quarter of 2014); against the 2nd of 2013, it decreased by 0.5 percentage points. The end of June 2014 the unemployment rate in the country stood at 11.2%. However, the youth unemployment (persons aged 15-24) rate stood at 21.3% and was by 0.1 percentage points higher than in the 1st quarter of 2014, and by 0.3 percentage points higher than in the 2nd quarter of 2013.
English: http://www.baltic-course.com/eng/analytics ...