Mário Mourão has no doubts about what led UGT to break with the Government and moving forward, together with the CGTP, towards a general strike on December 11th: “The Government pushed the UGT to the wall”, he stated. In an interview with Antena 1 and “Business Journal”the secretary general explains that the decision was taken after, at the last Social Concertation meeting, realizing that the executive was preparing to take the labor draft to Parliament without changes”, the unless UGT was ready to formalize an agreement.
The leader of the union center says he expects a strong support for the general strike and rules out the possibility that, within a month, a sufficient approach will emerge to avoid it. Still, he admits that the UGT may back down if the Government “stops, listens and reflects”. The warning, however, is clear: if in the meetings scheduled for November 19th and December 10th the executive presents a document similar to the one presented recently – which Mário Mourão classifies as “innocuous” – the union center will consider “scheduling two days of strike instead of one”.
Among the harshest criticisms directed at the executive is the immediate impact that the labor draft is already having on the ground, even before any parliamentary approval. On the subject, Mário Mourão rreports that some companies are acting as if the text were lawciting an EDP case as an example.
The secretary-general emphasizes that the Government created obstacles in the negotiation of collective bargaining by introducing “red lines” which, he guarantees, had not been announced at the start of the talks. Among these limits imposed by the executive is the individual time bank – a matter that the UGT considers a true negotiating frontier and which it is not willing to accept.
Mário Mourão also admits that, in the current process, the Government no longer plays a mediation role. According to the general secretary, if negotiations had taken place directly between unions and employers’ confederations, it would have been possible to reach bilateral understandings. For the person responsible, the Executive chose instead to intervene as an interested party, which, in his view, ended up stopping these advances.
First general strike, which took place in 1982, when Francisco Pinto Balsemão was prime minister. The first with an agreement between CGTP and UGT was the first absolute majority of Cavaco Silva, in 1988
Rui Ochoa
Regarding the new amendment proposals sent by the Government of Luís Montenegro, Mário Mourão warns that, in certain matters – such as those relating to outsourcing – they are even worse than those presented in the initial document
For UGT, the text presented “is not enough” to believe that there is a real negotiating environment. The proposals are now being analyzed by the central secretariat and legal department, which will provide a response accompanied by new counter-proposals.
It is recalled that the Government’s revised proposal, delivered to UGT before the formal strike decisionincludes advances such as the replacement of three days of vacation due to attendance, adjustments to breastfeeding leave and the maintenance of three days of gestational mourning for the father. The Executive does not back down, however, on other matters considered critical by trade unions: individual time bank, extension of fixed-term contracts, flexibility of reinstatement in case of unlawful dismissal and revocation of limitations on outsourcing.