The government’s plan that every council should insist on a 40-hour working week from its workers has been found ‘unconstitutional.’
Most councils anyway had used a deliberate loophole in the legislation to avoid putting pressure on employees to work a full 40-hour week.
But now it's official, the Constitutional Court's panel of judges has decided the whole '35-hour working week' idea was flawed anyway.
Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho now can report to Portugal’s Troika of lenders that he really, really tried to get tens of thousands of local civil servants to work the extra hours, but the court said they didn't have to.
The Constitutional Court's ruling is that the government was "interfering in the collective bargaining agreements between Portugal’s councils and their workers" which the judges saw as “a violation of the principle of autonomy of local government.”
The court’s opinion had been sought by the Union of Public Administration Workers and the National Association of Parishes which will be delighted that its workers can "carry on carrying on," or revert to the old 35-hour week which is far less stressful than five, eight hour days.
Some councils had managed to increase workers’ hours, such as Oporto, which now will have to allow its workers to turn up for work for just 35 hours a week.
