Trade unions consulted on new government's programme

A new centre-left government took office in the Czech Republic in August 2004. It asked the CMKOS trade union confederation to participate in drawing up its programme, and the latter submitted a list of priority suggestions. The adopted programme includes commitments in areas such as promoting social dialogue and collective bargaining, amending labour law and reforming pensions.

A new government led by Prime Minister Stanislav Gross was formally appointed on 4 August 2004, after the demise of the previous administration led by Vladimír Špidla. The new centre-left coalition is made up of the same three parties as the previous government - the Czech Social Democratic Party (Česká strana sociálně demokratická, ČSSD), the Christian and Democratic Union-Czechoslovak People's Party (Křes'anská a demokratická unie-Československá strana lidová, KDU-SL) and the Freedom Union-Democratic Union (Unie svobody-Demokratická unie, ČUS-DEU).

Prime Minister Gross, invited the largest trade union confederation, the Czech-Moravian Confederation of Trade Unions (Českomoravská konfederace odborových svazů, CMKOS) to take part in preparing the government’s 'programme declaration'. CMKOS presented the government with its 'minimum trade union recommendations', a set of suggestions considered as top priorities by the confederation from the point of view of the position and standard of living of employees in the Czech Republic. The government's programme declaration was formally adopted by the cabinet on 19 August.

The trade unions applaud the government's declared support for social dialogue and for improving tripartite arrangements, and its commitment to discussing important problems in advance with trade unions and employers. The government wants to promote use of the tripartite Council of Economic and Social Agreement (Rada hospodářské a sociální dohody, RHSD) as well as collective bargaining at all levels, including in the public sector and services sector. It pledges to table legislation that would make it possible to extend 'higher-level collective agreements' (ie sectoral agreements) as well as a new Labour Code that would provide greater room for contractual freedom in employment relations. It will propose more effective and comprehensive state supervision of compliance with labour regulations. CMKOS has demanded that all new regulations being prepared reject any form of restriction on trade union rights and that the government take care to ensure that these rights are not violated at company level.

In the area of social policy and social security, the government promises to submit a reform of the pension system and to pave the way for creating a 'state pension reserves account' to implement the reform. It will promote further development of private capital-based forms of 'voluntary supplementary pension insurance' and will also prepare a new act on sickness insurance to prevent abuses of the sickness benefits system. As regards unemployment, the programme declaration talks of expanding and improving the tools of 'active employment policy' targeted at long-term unemployed people and groups with difficulty finding work. One of the trade union suggestions that has been taken up is reducing the tax burden on people with low incomes, designed to increase their motivation to take on less well-paid work.

CMKOS welcomes the government’s planned measures to: support families with children; increase support for science and research; simplify the rules for entrepreneurial activity; fight against corruption, crime and the 'grey' and 'black' economies; and improve the enforcement of legislation.

According to the president of CMKOS, Milan Štech, the government’s programme declaration does not contain any plans that are unacceptable to the unions and the measures are feasible, though demanding to implement.