Bargaining in textiles faces difficulties

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Trade unions in the Portuguese textiles sector have made 2000 the year of wages, in an attempt to raise traditionally low pay rates in an industry which has experienced increasing productivity and export sales. However, bargaining has run into difficulties, with employers seeking flexibility in the organisation of working time. With negotiations stalled, the unions are demanding state intervention.

In Portugal, the overall textiles sector (textiles and clothing) employs close to 35% of the industrial workforce. There are some 96,000 employees in the textiles subsector, generally working in medium or large-sized companies. The clothing subsector employs around 122,000, mainly in multinational or small companies

The textiles and clothing sector has several employers' associations, including the Portuguese Association of Garment Industries (Associação Portuguesa dos Industriais de Vestuário, APIV) and the National Association of Clothing Manufacturers (Associação Nacional das Industrias de Vestuário e Confecção, ANIVEC), representing cotton, woolens, leather and clothing manufacturers. An employers' federation, Intertextil Portuguese, exists but has not been particularly active. There are number of trade unions, which belong to either the CGTP-affiliated Federation of Unions of Textile, Woolens, Garment, Footwear and Leather Workers of Portugal (Federação dos Sindicatos dos Trabalhadores Texteis, Lanifícios, Vestuário e Calçado e Peles de Portugal, FESETE) or the UGT-affiliated Democratic Textiles Union (Sindicato Democrático dos Texteis, SINDETEX).

Collective bargaining occurs principally at the level of the two subsectors - textiles (cotton, woolens and rug manufacturing) and clothing. In both subsectors, there are separate agreements for production workers and administrative workers. To a large extent, working conditions are the same throughout the whole sector. There are virtually no company-level agreements.

Recent statistics show that wages in the whole sector are very low (PT9902130N) and that average net pay in 1997 was below the statutory national minimum wage. According to the unions, 90% of the workers in the sector fall below this level. In addition, the number of workers in the lowest wage categories is extremely high, and opportunities for career advancement are practically nil. Pay inequalities between production and administrative workers are great: average collectively agreed monthly pay is 2.3 times higher for administrative workers than for production workers in the clothing subsector and 2.1 times higher in the textiles subsector (according to Quadros de Pesssoal, 1997)

Negotiations on the reduction of working time in the sector, in line with 1996 legislation introducing a 40-hour working week from the end of 1997 (PT9712154F), have become a contentious issue and the source of heated debates, with the main sources of contention being shifts and rest breaks (which employers do not want counted as part of actual working time - PT9812117N). The General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses, CGTP) and the General Workers' Union (União Geral de Trabalhadores, UGT) continue to assert that because of problems in interpreting the legislation, the average working week in textiles has held steady at 42.5 hours, with especially long hours in leather and clothing. Some negotiation on the organisation of working time has been carried out over the years in sector-level agreements, principally with regard to shiftwork in 1996. An agreement signed with SINDETEX in 1992 provided for new forms of working time organisation, but this agreement never came into effect because it was contingent on an identical bargaining process with FESETE, which never took place.

The position of the various sets of negotiations involving FESETE are currently as follows:

• in the textiles subsector, negotiations have broken down;

• in the clothing subsector, conciliation which started at the beginning of 1999 is at the breaking point; and

• negotiations in the leather subsector are at a stalemate.

FESETE aims to make 2000 the "year of struggle for improved wages" and has thus put at the forefront of its demands a minimum wage increase of 5%. The 1999 inflation rate was 2.3%. According to CGTP, the sector's exports continue to increase, as does productivity. However, it claims that employers have mapped out virtually no forward-looking strategies, and that any plans that do exist rely heavily on low wages and a lack of investment in modernisation and technology, a stance aimed primarily at easy profit with no concern for long-term sustainability.

The employers' organisations in the clothing sector, APIV and ANIVEC, have presented a number of counterproposals to the wage increases sought by the unions. Among these are a global review of the collective agreement or, at least, renegotiation of the clauses dealing with the organisation of working time and, above all, rest breaks. FESETE has stated that it is willing to negotiate holidays, women's night work, and some points involving work flexibility. However, it is not willing to concede on the issue of 15-minute breaks being counted as part of working hours. For their part, the leather workers' unions have refused to accept an employers' proposal that one month's bonus payment be made contingent on reductions in absenteeism. In 1999 and January 2000, APIV and ANIVEC advised their members to increase pay unilaterally, as had occurred in previous years (PT9804175N).

The unions have responded to the employers' counterproposals by stating that if there are no negotiations to force compliance with the 40-hour week, the state should intervene and make use of the legal instruments at its disposal. They demand the publication of a labour regulation directive on working conditions in the sector. This would allow the government to take a clearer position on the definition of "actual working time" under the 40-hour week law, an issue that has already been clarified by judicial interpretation. FESETE has staged a demonstration in front of the Ministry of Labour, handing over a list of demands.