Greece

In Greece there is not a legal base for the workers' financial participation, and this reality is not very known in the country, despite the fact that the employers try to "push" the workers into financial participation schemes.

In the multinational companies the employers, often prefer to give shares to the workers, in substitution of the wage increases. This situation, according the partner trade union, cannot be accepted. The income of the financial participation is not retribution, for that reason, it should be considered as and addition to the remuneration established by collective agreement.

Despite the Irish case be pointed as an example to be followed and considered, and even widely commented in Greece, the partner trade union doesn't agree with the so mentioned benefits. This because the Irish progress is not only based on the application of financial participation schemes. The workers' conditions were kept and even were decreased. Also in Ireland exist poor companies and workers. So, it will be necessary to wait to see.

Especially because the Irish reality, and even the Slovenes’ reality, are quite different from the Greek reality.

In what concerns the countries that recently adhered to the European Union, and in the partner trade union's opinion, as the majority of them are coming across with inferior conditions to the one of the remaining member countries that cannot be used as a comparison, both for the Governments and for the employers.

The role of the employers is to modernise and to invest, new contracts, while the workers' role is to produce, to increase the capacity of production of the company and to assure the remuneration to live in condign conditions. So, from the employers’ side as well from the worker's side, if both want more, they can give more.

The partner trade union can accept the idea of the application of financial participation schemes since the workers win more with the eventual application. Winning more than the minimum foreseen in order to get, and to have access, to good European conditions. Everything they could obtain, in addition to what they already obtained, is an added value. They will never be able to accept to make depend the wages (understood here as the wage increase) of the financial participation.

To accept the application of financial participation schemes they only could do it on a collective basis, this is, to be accessible to all the workers. And such only could be applied through collective bargaining and not imposed by law. It is competence of the parts to choose, and consequently, to define the application conditions. They put some reticence towards the fact that there, in some countries, some examples of financial participation application through the European Works Councils. The members, representatives at the EWC express their own point of view, this in the majority of the cases, and not the collective point of view. That is the reason why it is necessary to elaborate rules on how the EWC’s representatives should act and how they could be, or not, conditioned.

The concessions, in understanding of the partner’s trade union, that Greece has done over the past years in order to assure the adhesion to the monetary union and convergence criteria should stop. The austerity should stop. The Greek workers should, enjoy now.

From the types or schemes of the workers' financial participation to apply, the partner trade union would refuse, immediately, the distribution of shares, or the share options, this due to the fact that the shares are not stable, they constitute a risk. As principle they would only accept the profit sharing, the bonus. There is only participation if there is profit. The connection remuneration - productivity is good, but only if such can be translated, as it was already underlined, into an increment of the minimum gained.