The president of the Authentic Independent Union (UIA), Luis de Jesús Rivera, on Thursday repudiated the decision of the Board of Fiscal Control (JCF) and government to reduce the vacation licenses of public employees for the second time in four years .
The union leader reacted indignantly to the Special Memorandum 40-2020 of the Office of Administration and Transformation of Human Resources of the Government of Puerto Rico which reduces the vacation leave of public employees by half, from 30 to 15 days a year.
“For more than forty years, public employees have enjoyed a 30-day annual leave for vacation as a significant marginal benefit to partially offset low wages in government. This benefit was snatched from public employees in 2017. with the passage of Law 26 which reduced the annual leave for holidays to 15 days.After a long process of lobbying before the Legislature the workers got the passage of Law 176-2019, which returned them to the public employees their 30 days of annual leave, “Jesús Rivera said in written communication.
However, he said that in recent days Judge Laura Taylor Swain of the U.S. District Court in Puerto Rico granted a request from the Fiscal Control Board to overturn this law which has led to that the government approves Special Memorandum 40-2020 in which the holiday leave is reduced for the second time in less than four years from 30 to 15 days a year. “The Board indicated that the restoration of holidays and sick days available to public employees makes the government workforce“ less efficient. ”These are baseless statements and we would like them to present empirical data on their alleged that public employees are less efficient if we enjoy more days off and illness, “said Luis de Jesus Rivera, chairman of the UIA Executive Committee. Governments in Puerto Rico need to open up and learn from what is good about other parts of the world. Instead what they do is shut themselves off from the world for being the closest thing to the United States of America, which is the only developed country that considers paid leisure time as a luxury and not a right. Australia, Germany, Italy and Spain offer their citizens more than 30 paid days off per year and paid holidays, while under federal law there are no basic labor rights such as the Leave for Leave or Sickness. There is also no maternity leave under the federal scheme in the United States.
He mentioned that there are American companies that offer their employees between 5 and 15 paid days off a year. A study by the U.S. Center for Economic and Political Research found that about a quarter of private-sector workers have no paid vacation. According to a survey conducted by the website Glassdoor.com, the American worker who had paid free time only half enjoyed what he deserved. According to the survey, 28% of workers said they were afraid of being left behind in their workplace while 17% said they feared losing their job, the other 19% indicated that they did not take a vacation because I wanted to have an edge over the competition for a job promotion, all based on a culture of fear in the workplace. However, more and more American companies, regardless of their jurisdiction, are committed to expanding their profits to ensure that their teams have optimal working conditions.
On the other hand, De Jesús Rivera stated that “In Puerto Rico we cannot allow the Fiscal Control Board and the rulers of this country to impose a culture of fear on us. Labor benefits such as licenses and the Christmas bonus are a form of remuneration that the worker receives, the aim of this benefit is clear: to improve the quality of life of the worker, to increase his job satisfaction so that he has a greater motivation at the time of carrying out his work and to promote his One of the great benefits of labor benefits is for both parties, the government and the worker, such as employee satisfaction, the image of government, work-life balance and labor peace. “
The UIA Executive Committee Chairman noted that the Fiscal Control Board, the Executive, Legislature and the trade union movement must sit down to negotiate this controversy over the benefits for the good of the workers and the people of Puerto Rico. “Workers will not allow us to be deprived of more rights and we will have to reaffirm our struggle to restore what we have lost,” he concluded.