About our current situation in Hungary

LIGA, Democratic League of Independent Trade Unions welcomes the ETUC’s statement deploring the new law on media services and mass media enacted on 1 January 2011. At the same time, we should not forget that in the past six months a number of laws or amendments seriously infringing employees’ and trade unions’ rights have been introduced in Hungary. The government did not have any kind of preliminary consultations about these laws and amendments with the social partners.

Since the change of government in April 2010, the governing party (or parties) - exploiting the situation resulting from the special characteristics of the electoral system, namely that they entered Parliament with a two-thirds majority - have introduced, among others, the following measures in the past six months:

Certain civil servants were given the legal status of government officials, and the new law on legal status makes it possible to terminate their employment without justification with a short, two-month notice period. The possibility of termination of employment without justification has since been expanded to the whole group of civil servants. The compliance of this regulation with the Hungarian Constitution is now being examined by the Constitutional Court on the basis of our confederation’s submission.                 .

When their employment ends, employees in the public sphere and of business associations that are two-thirds owned by the state are obliged to pay 98% tax on a certain part of the benefits they get - typically on the basis of the law or of a collective agreement - following the termination of their employment. For example, the redundancy pay, the average wage due during the notice period, and also the payment defined in the court resolution determining the unlawfulness of the termination of employment, are included in the tax base (that is, the more serious the violation of employees’ rights is, the bigger the amount that is taxable becomes). This law was already annulled once by the Constitutional Court. Parliament, however, has since re-enacted it, and - what makes it even worse - with retrospective effect (covering incomes received since 2005), and has also restricted the powers of the Constitutional Court in order to prevent it from examining whether the new regulations are in compliance with the Hungarian Constitution.  

In December 2010, following the individual MP motion, amendments to the law on the right to strike were adopted by the Hungarian Parliament, in just one week. As a result, striking against an employer carrying out an activity serving the basic interest of citizens is unlawful, unless the parties agree on the minimum service level and its conditions, or, if there is no agreement, the level should be defined by the court. This is an infringement of the right to strike.

As for the way the above amendments were adopted, it is especially damaging that there had been no previous consultations at all with the social partners. The institutions of social dialogue have been practically neglected by the new government in other matters as well: it has failed to convene the National Interest Reconciliation Council for more than half a year, thus violating the law, and, in a questionable manner, on the basis of individual MPs motions, it amended several laws concerning workers’ rights without any consultation, which resulted in causing serious disadvantages to workers.

For your information we enclose the law on strike enacted this year, as well as the related objections of LIGA Trade Unions and would like to ask you to deplore the anti-employee attitude of the Hungarian government in a statement, similar to the ETUC’s position on the “media law”, and to call the Prime Minister and the responsible ministers through all the formal and informal channels to fully respect the institutions of the social partners. This latter is especially necessary, as during the Hungarian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, Hungary should not turn its back at the national level on the social partners, who play an important role in European law and institutions.

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