The National Federation of Trade Unions of Workers in Public and Social Functions (FNSTFPS) today regretted that the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) has not shown openness to discussing the overtime strike.
“The strike doesn’t start until the 22nd,” so “there’s still time for the government, if it wants to call, to call” to discuss minimum services or the demands included in the overtime notice, Artur Cerqueira, head of the FNSTFPS, told Lusa.
However, “we don’t think that’s going to happen”, he admitted.
“This strike notice allows workers, as a whole, not to work more than the mandatory 150 hours” for the civil service until the end of the year, he explained, stressing that this call is a way of responding to the excessive workload imposed on AIMA employees.
However, “if any workers decide they want to go to work, they will,” he said, pointing out that the scheduled strike allows each employee to “assess whether or not they are too tired” to work overtime.
Therefore, “we don’t expect [this strike] to have the response that a strike on normal work has,” he explained.
On the other hand, “this strike will last until the end of the year”, always “with the expectation that it can be called off, if AIMA takes the necessary measures to create that staff map with a new number of workers sufficient” to respond to pending requests and contacts with immigrants.
“This is yet another strike notice to put pressure on AIMA to find permanent solutions,” he said, pointing out that this strike only “covers civil service workers” and the organization has many employees who belong to private partner organizations.
“For example, the mediators are workers subcontracted to NGOs,” he added.
This strike notice has been criticized by other AIMA unions.
The leader of the Migration Technicians Union (STM), Manuela Niza, said that “no one has ever been forced to work overtime” and that the FNSTFPS is “taking advantage” of this.
“In this day and age, a union should be a partner in solving problems, always taking into account respect for workers’ rights” and the FNSTFPS, “instead of demanding better working conditions in the long term, is acting as a counter-power force without taking the public interest into account”.
In response to these criticisms, Artur Cerqueira deplored the criticism and said that civil servants have been pressured to work overtime, as the law itself indicates.
“Public administration workers are obliged to work overtime. The 150 hours [per year] is the maximum they can do without having to obtain financial authorization” from the employer, he explained.
But if “there is a justification from management for exceeding the 150 hours” of overtime per year, the worker can only refuse if they present a “justifiable reason”.
Lusa tried to get a comment from AIMA on this strike, but has so far been unsuccessful.
The FNSTFPS’s demands document, which underpins the notice, mentions various problems at AIMA, including the absence of internal regulations, a lack of internal communication, “undersized teams, which translates into work overload and high levels of stress and anxiety”.
According to the document, to which Lusa had access, many of the employees “have already exceeded 150 hours of overtime work” by 2024 (the legal limit for the civil service), but “continue to work overtime without being paid”.
“The Federation believes that the situation we have reached is the result of a series of misguided policies by various governments,” but “what is important and urgent is that the government assumes its responsibilities and that all measures must be taken as a matter of urgency,” putting an “end to the trampling on the rights of workers and citizens,” the union also said.
At the end of July, the government appointed Pedro Portugal Gaspar to the board of AIMA and transferred the organization’s then president, Goes Pinheiro, to the new mission structure for migration.
The new Mission Structure for the Recovery of Pending Immigrant Cases, provided for in the Migration Action Plan, will have the mission of “resolving the history of more than 400,000 regularization cases pending analysis, accumulated over the last few years,” the executive said at the time.
The structure will have up to 100 specialists, 150 technical assistants and 50 operational assistants.
As for AIMA, the government has promised a “change of direction”, seeking to implement the measures set out in the Migration Action Plan presented at the beginning of June.
