May 1st march will be held in Vilnius – MadeinVilnius.lt

On May 1, commemorating the International Day of the Patron Saint of Labor and Workers, St. On St. Joseph’s Day, we invite you to actively participate in the trade union march on Gediminas Avenue in Vilnius, which will start at 11:00 a.m. at the Seimas and at 12:00 p.m. will end with a rally at the Government House.

Starting as a day of struggle for the eight-hour work day, May 1 has become a day of struggle for all workers around the world for their rights.

Incorrect payment of workers, forcing them to work overtime at the expense of their health in order to ensure a decent life for themselves and their children, unsafe working conditions, psychological violence at work and the arbitrariness of employers are still commonplace in Lithuania.

Only unionized workers can change this. However, even nowadays, when Europe is being built on the basis of social dialogue, forces are emerging in Lithuania that want to take away from workers even those rights that they won together with the restoration of the Lithuanian state and want to return them to the times when workers were without rights and trade unions had to follow the instructions of the authorities.

TS-LKD Seimas member Vilius Semeška proposed and the Seimas approved the consideration of amendments to the Law on Trade Unions, which would force trade unions to devote their efforts not to employee representation, but to writing bureaucratic reports, by additionally hiring financiers for this, forcing them to disclose confidential information about their members to third parties, which would violate the Constitution of Lithuania Article 50 and would break the international obligations that Lithuania assumed by ratifying International Labor Organization Convention No. 87, which ensures the self-governance of all trade unions in the world and protection from government interference in their activities and obstacles to trade unions defending workers’ rights.

Although the author of these amendments claims to want transparency, the fact that he proposed the amendments to be implemented from May 1, when trade unions around the world celebrate International Labor Day, shows that this is a deliberate attack on workers and the trade unions that represent them in order to their hopes to live, work and create their future with dignity in Independent Lithuania were destroyed.

Attempts are being made to weaken trade unions in Lithuania, despite the fact that they do not yet have the rights that are common in the old European Union countries, which Lithuania is trying to emulate.

The regulation of strikes in Lithuania is almost no different from the regulation of strikes in non-democratic Belarus. In order to stop the employers’ abuses and to declare a strike, it is necessary to go through a two-year marathon of courts and other procedures, which costs the trade union a lot of time and money, and during this time it allows dishonest employers to freely exercise their will, mock their employees and the European social dialogue.

Lithuania, a country of the European Union, is embarrassed by the laws that allow the dismissal of trade union leaders without the consent of the trade unions, or to worsen their working conditions in such a way that they themselves quit their jobs, and to dismiss them without reason, within three days, upon payment of six months’ salary an employee who started to create a trade union.

“Let’s come and demand that the rights of workers and the trade unions that represent them are not restricted, that the heads of trade unions are protected from dismissal, and that the regulation of strikes be European”, – the general secretary of the Lithuanian trade union “Solidarity” Daivas Kvedaraitė and others are invited to the chairmen and others in a letter distributed to trade union leaders.