Sintra, Portugal, Dec. 2, 2025 (Lusa) - The secretary-general of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) said on Tuesday that the labour minister was right to be concerned about the scale of the general strike on the 11th and that the only solution is to drop the labour package.
"The minister is not tired, the minister is concerned about the scale of the strike," Paulo Raimundo replied to journalists when asked about recent statements by the Minister of Labour, Solidarity and Social Security, Rosário Palma Ramalho, that she is tired of strikes having political motives behind them.
For the secretary-general of the PCP, "the more the minister speaks, the more the prime minister speaks, the more the defenders of the labour package speak, and the more workers know the content of the labour package, the more precariousness, the more regulation of working hours, the more redundancies, the more they know, the bigger the general strike will be".
Paulo Raimundo stressed that the minister "is concerned and has reasons to be", but "there is a simple way to resolve her concern": "withdraw the labour package from discussion, as there is no possible discussion".
The secretary-general of the PCP spoke to journalists on the sidelines of a visit to the Santa Maria Secondary School in Sintra, as part of the national campaign "Another direction for the country. Reject the labour package, exploitation and injustice".
Paulo Raimundo stressed the need to value education, teachers and their careers, as well as to resolve the "dramatic problem" of more teachers leaving the profession than entering it.
"The labour package is bad for all workers, including teachers," said Paulo Raimundo.
The general strike on 11 December was announced by the secretary-general of the CGTP trade union confederation, Tiago Oliveira, at the end of the national march against the labour package on 8 November, which brought thousands of workers down Avenida da Liberdade in Lisbon to protest against the changes proposed by Luís Montenegro's government.
Days later, the Socialist-backed UGT union confederation unanimously approved the decision to move forward in convergence with the CGTP, thus including the favourable vote of the Social Democratic Workers (TSD).
This will be the first strike to bring the two trade union confederations together since June 2013, when Portugal was under the “troika” intervention.
The changes set out in the proposal presented by the government on 24 July as a "profound" revision of labour legislation, which provides for the revision of more than a hundred articles of the Labour Code, range from the area of parenthood (with changes to parental leave, breastfeeding and pregnancy bereavement) to flexible working, training in companies and trial periods for employment contracts, and also provide for an extension of the sectors covered by minimum services in the event of a strike.
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