Employment contracts: Stagnant average wages in Greece [Πίνακας] – Financial Postman
The collapse of sectoral contracts in the last decade means that 950,000 are barely covered workers, i.e. 25% of the total. This element shows the impasse of labor wages in our country and demonstrates the reason why average wages remain fixed, despite the increase in minimum wages.
80% of workers say they didn’t get a raise in the past year, which means increases in the thresholds don’t affect the rest salaries.
Minimum wage: How from 751 it will reach close to 780 euros
The recording comes from the report of the Labor Institute of the GSEE, while the Confederation put forward the request – in addition to the adjustment of the minimum wage – to strengthen collective negotiations, so that the collective labor agreements can be reinstated.
Industry contracts
The extremely low percentage of employee coverage by collective bargaining in our country creates additional problems, as in the coming years Greece is obliged – by the recent European directive – to increase the percentage of coverage by collective agreements to 80% of employees. For this to happen, the rate of coverage by collective agreements would have to increase by 54.2 percentage points.
The percentage of workers covered by collective bargaining in Greece in 2018 was 25.8% ‒ close to the equivalent of Latvia and Slovakia. On the contrary, in the countries of central and northern Europe the coverage rates exceed 70%.
The large temporal evolution from 2010 onwards regarding collective labor agreements shows that even in 2021 the weakening of free collective bargaining and the reduction of the number of collective labor agreements continued. In particular, in 2021, 16 national sectoral and homo-professional labor contracts, 9 local homo-professional and 182 operational contracts were signed.
Salaries unchanged
The ERGANI system data of the year 2021 show that the 182 new operational collective labor agreements cover only 152,077 employees. Of these, 141 operational contracts (77%), which cover 86,171 workers, keep salaries unchanged, 33 operational contracts (18%), which have 60,263 workers, provide for modest wage increases, and the rest338. employees, anticipate a reduction in wages.
Also in 2021, there were a total of 34 collective labor agreements (sectoral and same-occupational), which potentially cover approximately 625,000 workers and correspond to 27% of all salaried workers, 2,278,394 people (according to ERGANI data).
Little coverage
The actual percentage is even lower if it is taken into account that out of all sectoral and co-occupational employment agreements, only five collective agreements have generally mandatory coverages, i.e. mandatory demands on all workers from all products of the industry or occupation.
These collective agreements: hotels, tourist accommodation, banks, cruise ship operators and lift electricians.
The rest of the collective agreements apply – mandatory – only to the members of the contracting parties (employers and employees).