Transparency & Corruption, Low pay/minimum wages, Quality employment, Greece, Croatia, Armenia
Union movements organise protests over surge in inflation
With inflation increasing rapidly across Europe, trade union movements are mobilising to highlight the cost-of-living challenges facing workers, their families as well as pensioners and students. Latest figures show prices rising at anything from 6.5% to nearly 23% a year in Europe with further increases predicted. The CMKOS confederation in the Czech Republic is calling for a national demonstration in Prague on 5 September while the ÖGB confederation in Austria is coordinating protests around the country on 17 September. In between these two, the GSEE private sector and ADEDY public sector
Capacity building project for the hospital sector in Central, East and Southern Europe started
On 28 March 2019 EPSU participated, together with its representatives of the two national affiliates from Romania, Sanitas, and Croatia, HSSMS-MT, in the kick-off meeting of the joint HOSPEEM-EPSU project focusing on strengthening social dialogue in the hospital sector that will run in 2019 and 2020.
Health workers call for higher pay to stop emigration
On 12 May healthworkers in Sofia and Zagreb demonstrated over poor pay and working conditions and the crisis of understaffing. 5000 nurses, medical professionals, midwives and lab technicians joined a demonstration outside the Council of Ministers in Sofia demanding a 1500 Lev (EUR 765) minimum wage for health workers as a step towards stemming the flow of health workers out of the country. In Zagreb the call was also for improved pay and working conditions and in particular the respect for collective agreements in relation to overtime pay.
East-West pay convergence stalls
Bulgaria
Croatia
Czech Republic
Estonia
Hungary
Latvia
Lithuania
Poland
Romania
Slovak Republic
Slovenia
An analysis by the European Trade Union Institute shows that wage convergence between East and West in Europe was steady up until 2008. However, since then the trend has either stalled or gone into reverse. Taking national average pay as a percentage of the average across the pre-2004 EU15, Croatia and Hungary show the largest increase in the pay gap since 2008. There were also increases in Slovenia, Czech Republic, Poland and Romania.Most progress was made in Bulgaria but from a very low level (11.8%) to 17.7%, still less than a fifth of average pay in the West.