New study examines employment and industrial relations

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In October 2002, the findings of a survey on employment and industrial relations in Greece were released. The survey of over 2,000 companies, carried out by INE/GSEE, examined the structure, composition and development of employment, and policies conducted in the areas of employment, working time, pay and flexibility. The study also sought to evaluate the impact of recent legislative changes in these areas.

On 23 October 2002, the findings of a nationwide survey on 'Employment and industrial relations in Greece: reality – trends – prospects' were released by the Institute of Labour (INE) of the Greek General Confederation of Labour (GSEE) .

Aims and method

The nationwide survey conducted by INE/GSEE on employment and industrial relations in Greece was aimed at recording present-day reality a number of areas and investigating the emerging trends and prospects. More specifically, the survey sought to:

• discover the present situation in Greek companies with regard to the structure and composition of employment and the policies conducted in the areas of working time and pay;

• examine the situation with regard to the progress of recruitment and dismissals during the previous 12 months;

• find out the trends that have emerged with regard to a range of company flexibility policies; and

• evaluate the impact of recent legislation regarding employment and industrial relations (law 2874/2000) one year after its implementation (GR0012192F and GR0104104N). This legislation introduced changes in areas such as overtime, working time flexibility, part-time workers' pay and collective redundancies

This survey was carried out by INE/GSEE, in collaboration with Metron Analysis in June and July 2002. It used interviews to collect data, and covered all regions of the country. The sample used for the survey was 2,016 companies in the private sector, selected from a group of 87,000 of Greece’s largest companies from the point of view of turnover (ie those with a turnover of over EUR 29,347 or GRD10 million), which employ at least one person.

Main findings

The survey's main findings related to employment and industrial relations are as follows.

• 'Typical' (ie open-ended and full-time) employment continues to be the main form of employment, making up at least 80% of paid employment. However, in recent months 'typical' employment has been seen in some cases to be giving way to a variety of forms of flexible employment.

• Temporary employment, in its various forms (eg fixed-term contracts and seasonal employment) represents the largest proportion of the 'flexibly employed' labour force (15%). However, part-time employment remains at low levels (4% of all employment), and has shown no particularly significant prospects for growth.

• The use of telework and hiring-out of labour (ie temporary agency work) is currently limited to particularly small areas of the labour market, but with a clear tendency to increase.

• The flexibility practice most frequently used by companies is contracting/subcontracting, used by a quarter of companies, with tendencies towards a further increase. For about half the firms using this practice, it meets their standing needs of companies, replacing a significant part of employment in these companies.

• The ratio of recruitments to dismissals over the 12 months prior to the survey had been basically positive on the side of recruitment. The majority of companies (54%) had engaged new staff, and about half of them (28%) had dismissed staff, while a significant proportion of companies had carried out both recruitments and dismissals.

• The majority (55%) of the newly engaged staff had been hired for jobs constituting flexible forms of employment, most of them seasonal.

• Among companies with 50-199 employees, the category that was most affected by the change brought by law 2874/2000 to the definition of collective redundancies - there must now be at least four redundancies a month to qualify - a particular increase in dismissals was recorded. Furthermore, over 60% of the staff dismissed in these cases were replaced by workers in flexible jobs.

• The provisions of law 2874/2200 regarding the promotion of employment appear to have made a very limited contribution to increasing employment. Only 6% of companies, responsible for 12% of all recruitment over the period examined (and these recruitments were are not exclusively attributable to the measures concerned) were directly influenced in the direction of new job creation by the new regulations on increasing the cost of overtime exceeding maximum working hours, 'abolishing' overtime and reducing employers’ social insurance contributions. The other 48% of companies that had recruited stated that the new workers had been taken on entirely independently of the content of the new regulations. Finally, flexible working time arrangements had in almost all cases not been implemented, following the passage of the relevant regulations which allowed them.

• Individual company policy regarding working time issues seems to be characterised by: a refusal to introduce a 39-hour week; lack of interest in the introduction of collective flexible working time arrangements on the terms set by the new law; and interest in implementing individual agreements between employees and employers, bypassing the process of collective agreement, in the framework of managerial prerogative. As regards the possibility created by the new law of reducing the cost of overtime exceeding maximum working hours and extending special types of overtime, the position of companies is divided and rather negative in the face of such a prospect.

• Although for companies as a whole the basis for their pay policy is the relevant collective agreement, about half of the companies exceed the provisions of collective agreements with regard to the regular remuneration of at least a part of their staff, and a quarter of the companies exceed these provisions with regard to all their staff.

• With regard to pay flexibility policies and their connection with workers’ performance/productivity or company operating results (eg profit-sharing), such practices are used in a quarter of the companies, some 80% of which use performance-linked pay policies.

Commentary

The findings of the INE/GSEE survey are valuable material for conducting policy in the labour market field. Indeed, in view of the need announced by the government to launch social dialogue on industrial relations issues, the survey should help to clarify further the terms on which the present-day Greek labour market operates. This is a necessary precondition for creating and conducting the necessary policy adapted to the regulated and smooth functioning of the labour market and industrial relations in Greece. (Giannis Kouzis, INE/GSEE)