Legislation approved on right to organise in public administration

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Legislation came into effect on 1 April 1999, regulating trade union freedom and the right of employees to organise in Portugal's public administration. This ends over two decades without any specific legislation on the issue.

On 19 March 1999, decree-law 84/99 was published. The legislation, which came into effect on 1 April, "guarantees trade union freedom in the public administration and regulates how it is to be implemented". Since the legislation puts an end to a 24-year period during which, to a great extent, no specific legislation on trade union freedom/the right to organise existed in Portugal's public administration, it is of considerable significance and symbolic importance.

Previously, the Trade Union Act (decree-law 215-B/75 of 30 April 1975) had called for special legislation to define the regime to be applied on trade union freedom in the public services. The Portuguese Constitution, passed in 1976, recognised the right to organise as a fundamental right of all workers and made compulsory its application to all workers, including workers in a position of subordination in public administration. There was no question, however, that public servants fully possessed the right to organise, since the Trade Union Act did not cover them, and the rules governing their trade union freedom remained to be defined. In the meantime, the time-honoured understanding became entrenched that, by analogy, the Trade Union Act was to be applied to union activity among public servants as well. Moreover, the fact that there was no directly relevant legislation did not prevent the growth and consolidation of a strong trade union movement within the public administration. What is more, other relevant measures of a generic nature, such as those dealing with absence from work and leave, were based on the presupposition that rules, similar to those in the Trade Union Act, were to some degree being applied in the public administration.

The content of the new legislation is not unlike the Trade Union Act, but the rules it contains are especially adapted to the specific manner in which the different public administration services function. In some cases, it features a number of innovations (such as flexible management of the time off work granted to employees involved in union activity) which may even spark future changes in the Trade Union Act.

This new legislation covers primarily the right to organise. However, it was followed by new legislation (executive order 100/99 of 31 March 1999) that specifically regulates (in article 19) certain aspects of the right to strike for public administration employees. This legislation renders applicable to public administration employees the general regime found in Law 65/77 of 26 August 1977 (which, like the Trade Union Act, called for special legislation to cover strikes in the public service). However, the right to collective bargaining in the public administration is still conditioned by extremely limiting decree-law 45-A/84 of 3 February 1984.