First agreement on the 35-hour week

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September 1998 saw Greece's first enterprise-level agreement introducing the 35-hour week without a reduction in pay, at the Hochtief building concern.

On 3 September 1998, Greece's first enterprise-level agreement implementing a 35-hour week without a reduction in pay was signed by Hochtief Aktiengesellschaft vorm Gebr Helfman, a company headquartered in Essen, Germany (hereafter referred to as Hochtief), and the New Athens Airport branch of the Union of Building, Construction and Construction Materials Workers.

The agreement concerns only those building workers (numbering about 1,000) who have been hired by Hochtief itself, and not its subsidiaries or associated companies. The deal reduces the building workers' working day from eight to seven hours. This is backdated to 1 May 1998, and overtime payments will be made for the hours worked in excess of seven hours daily from May to September. The agreement also introduces a five-day (Monday-Friday) week. The parties to the agreement agreed that there will be no pay cuts for the period from 1 April to 30 April 1998, when workers had already begun working a 35-hour week unilaterally. Amounts withheld will be paid retroactively. However, it was agreed that wages for other work stoppages already carried out would be withheld. The agreement, which is advantageous to workers, also includes people employed by contractors and subcontractors.

In an statement, the building workers' union said that the agreement is the outcome of a hard struggle by workers, which forced Hochtief to recognise the worksite union branch as the representative of the workers employed there and to accept their basic demands after discussions with the union. The "hard struggle by workers" the union refers to dates from June 1997 and has included a series of strikes participated in by all building workers.