Working six days a week, instead of five, with a 40% salary increase on the extra day. This is the Greek government’s proposal to the country’s active population, to try to resolve the especially seasonal workforce crises: workers may have to work the “long week”, starting from July 1st, if their employers request it. The sixth day of work will be paid 40 percent more than a normal day, and even more if it is a public holiday: a sort of regular “overtime”. The tourism sector is excluded from the new rule, where the 40-hour week had already been abolished last summer; mainly affected by industry, telecommunications and retail trade.
The Greek working week, however, is already the longest in Europe: one Greek in 8 works more than 48 hours a week on a stable basis, and on average the commitment required is 39.4 hours a week (Eurostat). While wages are notoriously low, and the country’s productivity is struggling after fifteen years of recession and three costly European bailouts. Reviving growth and raising productivity are the two strong points of the center-right government that has led the country since 2019, dismantling many labor regulations piece by piece.
Greece, also due to very low wages, experiences constant manpower crises, which began after the 2010 crisis when the most educated young people expatriated, never to return. And a conspicuous phenomenon of illegal work, which the “long week” should counteract: especially in industry, overtime is often invisible in the paycheck and rewarded illegally. Or not rewarded at all: the working week now lasts 40 hours, but it is already possible for employers to request up to two extra hours per day of unpaid overtime, albeit – in theory – for short periods and voluntarily.
Now, this is the intention of the Minister of Labor Adonis Georgiadis, a worker will instead be able to see these “overtimes” that he often already works paid in the envelope.
Eight hours a day, six days a week, makes for a 48-hour work week. With the new law, far more than one in 8 Greeks could work this much. While the rich countries of Europe shorten the working week – in Belgium it already lasts four days from 2022, and experiments in this sense are in force in Germany, the Netherlands , Ireland, Spain – Greece, bringing up the rear, is going in the opposite direction.
There are many objections. With the new law, workers cannot refuse to work for six days if the employer requests it. This innovation has not passed through any form of collective bargaining, an institution that the labor laws introduced by Nea Demokratia, the party of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, have so far severely limited. That is, unions and workers’ representatives had no say in the decision.
Furthermore, the “long week” would limit new hires, forcing those who already have a job to work even harder, and leaving out those who don’t. To the benefit of employers.
The law on the “long week” is aimed above all at the productive categories that guarantee services at least 12 hours a day, if not 24 hours a day: among these sectors there is no tourism, because hotels and restaurants had already seen the abolition of the working week five days in 2023.
However, for seasonal contracts, and especially for lower-level jobs such as cleaning or agriculture, the government plans to establish quotas for temporary migrants from Egypt, India and other non-EU countries.
The “long week” will therefore be in force, according to the law, in the industrial sector, so as not to stop production where possible, and in telecommunications. Some sectors of the civil service and some state-owned enterprises can implement it. And also agriculture, especially in the warm harvest months.
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