Large hundreds of protesters paraded this Saturday in Lisbon against the Government’s labor package, in a protest called by CGTP’s Interjovem, which took to the streets the fear of a precarious situation that will last forever.
Already after 3pm, the time set for the beginning of the demonstration, hundreds of young people, but not only that, who filled Praça da Figueira, left towards Campo das Cebolas, where about an hour later the parade ended, marked by many flags, drums and many slogans against the labor package that the Government wants to approve, such as “Just one more push and the package will fall to the ground.”
“[Este pacote laboral] is particularly serious, it seeks to impose everything that a young worker does not need at the moment. In a country where more than half of young workers have precarious employment, this package seeks to extend the motivations for this precariousness and perpetuate this situation”, the coordinator of Interjovem, the CGTP inter-union organization dedicated to young people, told Lusa.
For Gonçalo Paixão, “this fight today is a great response that young workers give against this labor package” and “a moment when the Prime Minister and the Government must listen to young people and, in fact, completely back down with the labor package”.
The general secretary of the inter-union CGTP, Tiago Oliveira, was present at the protest, parading at the front of the demonstration, alongside young people “who are now in the world of work and who want a different future”, against the labor package that has been negotiated without the presence of the CGTP since the beginning, with the inter-union attributing this departure to the executive and a “political objective” of “further degrading” working conditions.
“What the Government is demonstrating is that it is not here to serve the people, it is here to serve half a dozen, it is here to serve those who come to the media every day to rub their hands with satisfaction with this labor package and who are doing it are the bosses, the big companies, the big economic groups. This clearly demonstrates what the content of this labor package is”, said Tiago Oliveira.
On the table, he added, all forms of struggle continue, including a new general strike, but for now a national demonstration is called for April 17th.
Alongside many tourists, who watched surprised, curious and with their cell phones at the ready, as the Interjovem parade passed by, the secretary general of the PCP, Paulo Raimundo, was present at the protest, a demonstration of “participation and combativeness” by young people against the Government’s labor package which, he said, is meant to “make it fall”.
“The Government, from the beginning, never wanted to negotiate anything. Everything else was maneuvers”, said Paulo Raimundo, criticizing the exclusion of CGTP from the negotiations.
“The Government wants to impose. It wants to put out the window what it was unable to put out the door. And it will take this to the Assembly. […] The Government needs to realize that changing labor legislation, further increasing repression, further increasing the difficulties faced by those who work, is declaring its political and social defeat. And therefore, if you want to continue this madness, you will have to accept the consequences. It’s not just the Government, it’s the Government and those who accompany it in this madness”, he stated, pointing to Chega and the Liberal Initiative.
United in common concerns, there were several sectoral protests that wanted to be present at the demonstration today, such as the Catholic Workers’ Youth. Its president, Pedro Esteves, said that the organization he leads believes “in improving the conditions of workers and also in the condition of dignity of that same worker”.
“This package in no way defends what [são] the needs of working youth. In this case, it promotes fixed-term contracts, temporary contracts, it promotes precariousness and not the stability that young people need. Young people today need stability and not more precariousness”, he said, expressing satisfaction with the “popular mass of young people” he found on the streets.
Representing the National Union of Psychologists, Mariana Guerra expressed concern about the professional internship imposed at the beginning of one’s career, which has become “an obstacle” to beginning one’s career and which leads many to give up before even starting, denouncing “horrible and undignified conditions” to which many submit themselves in order to access the profession.
Margarida Timóteo, still studying, revealed she was concerned about the difficulty in finding “a decent place” to intern” and is also one of the many for whom precariousness casts a shadow over their future.
The president of the Association of Scientific Research Fellows (ABIC), João Neto, highlighted to Lusa the “very weakened position” of these workers compared to those who have an employment contract and considered the work package proposed by the executive a reinforcement of this weakening.
The ABIC representative said that “precariousness in science is the rule, rather than the exception” and that the labor package could lead scholarship holders to remain in this condition “for their entire lives”, a situation that already occurs, with “scholarship holders, scientific workers moving from scholarship to scholarship, without ever having any employment contract”.
“This doesn’t seem fair to us. What we want is the reversal of scholarship status and we don’t want this package to pass, because, effectively, our fight is to be workers and we want to be workers with conditions and we don’t want workers to have the conditions of scholarship holders, which is in practice what we are seeing happen”, he concluded.
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