Labour Minister Marinos Moushouttas has called a meeting of the social partners on 17 November to revisit the policy on employing third-country workers, after strong protests by trade unions that some employers are breaching the strategy on employing such workers.
The meeting will be held outside the framework of the Labour Advisory Board. The unions say the problem has grown mainly in the hotel and construction industries, where provisions of collective agreements are being breached, and that businesses operating legally face unfair competition from those choosing to cut costs by underhand means.
In an article entitled ‘Strategy for deregulating the labour market’, Andreas Matsas, general secretary of the Cyprus Workers’ Confederation (SEK), wrote that one of the main causes of deregulation was the strategy for employing third-country workers, which he described as unilaterally revised. Despite union warnings about the distortions it would cause, its provisions had dangerously deregulated the labour market, he wrote.
In many construction cases, the data pointed to a tragic situation, Matsas wrote, while “in several cases in the hotel sector, conditions resembling a ‘slave market’ are recorded”.
Matsas told Phileleftheros that SEK would again set out its positions at the 17 November meeting. It wants the technical committees that assess data and businesses’ needs to be reinstated. It is also calling for a political decision making public contracts conditional on the application of collective agreements to be implemented as soon as possible.
Employers’ position
Employers say the difficulty of finding staff remains huge, making it necessary to employ foreign workers. If there is evidence of violations, they say, it should be submitted to the competent authorities and examined.
Background
In early 2025, the Cabinet approved a ‘Framework for the Employment of Foreign Workers’, which revised several aspects of hiring foreign workers. The unions were unhappy with it at the time, saying it met employers’ key demands.
The changes that drew objections included allowing workers to be moved between premises of the same employer within a district. Another raised the maximum deduction from a worker’s gross basic pay for housing from 10 to 25 per cent.
