The directive will be incorporated into a bill that the Ministry of Labor intends to submit to Parliament in the fall around mid-October.
Employers and employees will have access to reliable databases and through data they will draw on wages, profitability and employment, they will be able to come to the negotiating table with each side setting realistic demands and aspirations.
Employers, on the other hand, will not be able to claim a lack of profits when their balance sheet figures show the opposite, while employees will not be able to ask for wage increases that are out of line with reality and far above the general salary level of workers in the sector. , regional and national level.
Target
The stake of the upcoming interventions is the increase in the percentage of collective agreements from the 30% that is today to the 80% that is the goal set by the Community Directive 2022/2041 for adequate wages in the member states of the European Union.
States where collective bargaining coverage of workers is high tend to have a small proportion of low-wage workers and high minimum wages, the directive states, noting that “each Member State with a collective bargaining coverage rate of less than 80% should adopt measures with the aim of strengthening said collective negotiations”.
The aim of the arrangements, as announced by the Minister of Labor and Social Security, Niki Kerameos, is to increase collective agreements through a set of interventions, incentives and sufficient information, so that employees and employers sit at the negotiating table with “open papers”.
On the table
One of the interventions being considered is to have access to official financial data on the profitability of businesses participating in a negotiation but also to data on the actual level of workers’ wages.
In this way, when the profitability of an industry is high and will be reflected in official indicators, companies will not be able to claim otherwise to avoid wage increases.
At the same time, the wage data of the Ergani system will be accessible, so that the actual level of wages is reflected and there is a realistic basis for the requests for wage increases by the representatives of the workers.
As things stand today, collective bargaining is failing because employers are citing financial constraints in giving raises, while unions are asking for raises that are often far from the average of workers’ actual raises nationally.
The result of failed negotiations is that industry contracts are shelved, and company level contracts are signed many times without wage increases! In the first quarter of 2024, 87 new operational collective agreements were signed, of which 31 provide for wage increases.
In cases where operational contracts are not even signed, there are individual contracts where each employee agrees on his salary with his employer with a minimum level of protection of the current basic salary (830 euros today).
Gas for a minimum wage of more than €950
The interventions under consideration will not change the system of determining the minimum wage, which will remain under the jurisdiction of the respective government. If the new framework also leads to an increase in contracts, then it is very likely that the minimum wage will exceed the 950 euros that the government has set as a goal until the spring of 2027, and correspondingly the average wage will move above 1,500 euros.
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