24/10/2012 Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development
Strasbourg, 24.10.2012 – The head of a committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has called on the Greek authorities to modify two 2010 reforms to Greek labour law recently judged illegal by the European Committee of Social Rights.
Liliane Maury Pasquier (Switzerland, SOC), who chairs PACE’s Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development, said the decision to extend to one year the “trial period” during which workers can be dimissed without notice, and the decision to cut the minimum salary for workers under 25 to two-thirds of the national minimum wage, should be reviewed.
“Both these measures were last week found to be in violation of the European Social Charter, to which Greece has signed up,” said Mrs Maury Pasquier. “They should urgently be modified to bring them into line with the Council of Europe’s social standards.”
She added: “Our Assembly, which represents political opinion across the 47 member states of the Council of Europe, recently called for a profound re-orientation of austerity programmes, ending their quasi-exclusive focus on expenditure cuts in social areas, which often hit the most vulnerable hardest.”
Pointing to recent PACE resolutions, Mrs Maury Pasquier said her committee – and its sub-committee on social and economic rights, headed by Carina Ohlsson (Sweden, SOC) – had recently resolved to do more to consolidate and develop social rights in Europe, in particular by pressing for better follow-up to the rulings of the European Social Charter’s monitoring body, including at national level.
As a first step, she announced a series of seminars for national parliamentarians in February 2013 involving countries whose national laws are not in compliance with the Charter – including on the employment conditions of workers under 18.