Social workers to strike over pay and conditions
By Khatia Bzhalava
Tuesday, June 30
After an unsuccessful attempt of labour mediation, social workers decided to write a letter to the Ministry of healthcare and officially strike in 3 days, demanding a pay rise and eradication of transporting problems. Human Rights and Monitoring Center – EMC reacts to the requests of social workers and shares a statement.
EMC finds it alarming that the Ministry of healthcare, the authority responsible for protecting labour rights and facilitating social dialogues, rejects providing its own employees with basic working conditions. EMC calls for the authority to satisfy social workers’ fair demands.
According to the statement, in the background of the pandemic, when thousands of people lost their incomes and the government’s anti-crisis social assistance programmes left parts of vulnerable and financially underprivileged groups beyond the support, flexible and proper functioning of the social protection system is crucial. According to EMC, since social workers have a key role in identifying and helping socially disadvantaged people, their strike might potentially bring severely disastrous consequences.
As EMC reports, working conditions of social workers are extremely hard.
“Their monthly wage of ?80 is significantly lower than already inadequate minimum living wage in the country and is unable to provide decent working and living possibilities. In addition, while working on regional cases, social workers have no transportation perks and in order to visit socially vulnerable families, they have to transport to several different destinations at their own expenses,” reads the statement.
EMC also pays attention to the vulnerability of social workers’ jobs. As mentioned in the statement, their labour agreement is signed monthly, for one month period, which makes their jobs extremely vulnerable and unstable on the one hand and apparently violates labour code requirements on the other hand. According to the Article 6 of LABOUR CODE OF GEORGIA ‘If a labour agreement has been concluded for more than 30 months, or if labour relations have continued on the basis of concluding fixed-term labour agreements for two or more consecutive times and the duration of the above labour relations exceeds 30 months, an open-ended labour agreement shall be deemed to have been concluded, ’ and as EMC reports, even though most of the social workers’ labour duration with monthly agreements concluded consecutive times far exceeds a period of 30months, guarantees of open-ended agreements defined by the law does not apply to them.
According to the statement, there are also some challenges regarding the labour dispute. Despite involving mediators in the collective dispute, due to problems of the mediator’s registry and termination of their authority, the process of mediation failed and the outcome of the labour dispute was not desirable for the employees(of the Social Service Agency).
EMC also finds it noteworthy that the Social Service Agency has been refusing lawyers and trade union ‘Solidarity Network’ to be involved in the negotiations. ‘deterring trade unions is especially alarming from the Ministry, which is responsible for facilitating healthy, equal and fair labour relationships between social partners in the country.’
Regarding all the mentioned information, EMC calls for The Ministry of Internally Displaced Persons from the Occupied Territories, Labour, Health and Social Affairs of Georgia to:
• Immediately restore communication with social workers and provide proceeding of negotiations with direct engagement of social workers’ representatives and trade unions in the process of collective dispute.
• acknowledge the fair demands of social workers regarding extremely low wages and legally unorganised labour agreements and provide social workers with decent and respectful working conditions.
