The leaders of Portugal’s General Workers’ Union (UGT) on Thursday, 9th April, rejected the government’s current proposal to revise labour legislation and called for negotiations to continue.
The confederation argued that several structural proposals it had presented remain absent from the draft reform. These include reducing working hours, strengthening the principle of more favourable treatment for workers, increasing compensation for dismissal, improving pay for overtime and night work, and restoring compensatory rest periods.
The union also advocates an increase in the national minimum wage, joint liability rules in outsourcing arrangements, tougher penalties for labour law violations and lower costs for accessing justice.
The union’s highest executive body said there remained “insufficient progress in negotiations” and that the proposal “does not yet allow consensus to be reached”, according to a resolution approved unanimously today.
The trade union confederation, led by Mário Mourão, said this position would be conveyed at the plenary meeting of the Social Concertation forum, “where the next step in the negotiation process should take place”.
“The UGT National Secretariat hopes that the progress already achieved and the work carried out through social dialogue will not be disregarded,” the document added.
Contacted by journalists, the Ministry of Labour declined to comment “until it receives official communication from the UGT”, saying it was awaiting the outcome calmly.
“In defence of workers” and “for a 21st-century labour framework with rights”, the UGT and its affiliated unions called for negotiations to continue, stressing that they would maintain efforts towards “fairer and more inclusive labour legislation capable of responding to present and future challenges, with stronger and more dynamic collective bargaining and trade unions”.
The confederation also said it would continue to submit proposals during the negotiation process.
In a separate statement, the UGT listed nine issues among the “main aspects preventing agreement” within the Social Concertation framework. These include extending both the duration and grounds for fixed-term contracts, ending the guarantee of reinstatement following unlawful dismissal, reintroducing individual working-time banks. and allowing changes in job category accompanied by pay reductions.
The union also criticised the non-application of collective agreements to outsourced workers, the removal of arbitration mechanisms in collective bargaining, measures facilitating the expiry of collective agreements, the expansion of minimum service requirements during strikes, and restrictions on trade union activity within companies.
The UGT therefore considers that, despite its “continuous and committed participation” over eight months of negotiations, the proposal still contains options it regards as unacceptable.
Earlier this week, following meetings with the UGT and four employer confederations, Labour Minister Rosário Palma Ramalho said the time had come for each social partner to consult its governing bodies on the proposed labour law amendments. A plenary meeting of Social Concertation will be scheduled “shortly”.
The government will “calmly await the outcome of that consultation”, which she described as “naturally decisive”.
In recent months, the government has held talks with the UGT and employer organisations while excluding the CGTP trade union confederation, arguing that CGTP had placed itself outside negotiations from the outset by demanding the withdrawal of the proposal.
The first draft of the labour reform, titled Trabalho XXI (“Work XXI”), was presented in July 2025 as a “deep reform of labour law”, proposing more than 100 amendments to the Labour Code. The proposal drew very strong criticism from trade unions and led to an extensive joint general strike by many of Portugal’s strongest unions on 11th December last year.
Source: LUSA
