For the Luxembourg Employers' Association (UEL) and its president, Michel Reckinger, inviting the employers’ organisation to discuss the thorny issue of the reduction of working time without providing the study, or even just a summary, is not worthy of social dialogue. Archive photo: Simon Verjus/Maison Moderne

For the Luxembourg Employers' Association (UEL) and its president, Michel Reckinger, inviting the employers’ organisation to discuss the thorny issue of the reduction of working time without providing the study, or even just a summary, is not worthy of social dialogue. Archive photo: Simon Verjus/Maison Moderne

The minister of labour, Georges Engel, has not yet presented the Liser study on the reduction of working time, which is due to be presented on Tuesday 25 April, but the Luxembourg Employers’ Association (UEL) is already denouncing it as “a sham social dialogue.”

After months of waiting, the minister of labour, (LSAP), will make an official presentation of a study by the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (Liser) on Tuesday 25 April. It will cover the advisability (or not) of shortening the workweek in Luxembourg.

Even though he had invited “at the last minute--on Thursday 20 April--the social partners to a standing committee on labour and employment,” notes the UEL, the employers’ association had not closed the door on this meeting, on the condition that it could have the Liser study beforehand, or at least its main points and the subjects that the minister wanted to address during the meeting.

The UEL and more generally the social partners are presented with a fait accompli. The timing (...) did not leave any chance for a real social dialogue.

 Luxembourg Employers’ Association (UEL)

The minister did not want to provide these data, considering that the Liser would present the study to the committee, which was due to meet at 1pm... just before the press conference to which the media was invited, at 2:30pm.

“Without prior sharing of the results,” criticises the UEL in a press release, “the UEL and more generally the social partners are presented with a fait accompli. The timing (...) did not give any chance for a real social dialogue.”

The study commissioned by the government and presented to the LSAP

“The organisation of this CPTE is thus a mere formality designed to enable the minister to tick the box for social dialogue,” denounces the UEL, which also questions the process. “It is quite astonishing, even revealing, that the minister of labour presented this study to the LSAP parliamentary group before the government council. Is the minister of labour operating on behalf of the government or rather on behalf of the LSAP candidate in future elections?”

While saying it was open to a properly organised discussion, the UEL also said that “the management of this dossier by the minister, without any exchange with the social partners, either upstream or downstream of the realisation of this study, only serves to drive home the point that social dialogue has lost momentum in recent years, a dialogue carried out--when it takes place--for the sake of form.”

This is a strange atmosphere, given that the person who should be defending the LSAP in the upcoming legislative elections, (LSAP), had hoped for a constructive debate on a complex subject.

This story was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano.

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