In connection with the draft Law on Amendments and Supplements to the Labor Code submitted to the National Assembly and the proposals already made by the Confederation of Employers and Industrialists in Bulgaria, I additionally present the following proposal:
1. To create a new paragraph 10a with the following content:
"§ 10a. In Article 146, paragraph 1, the number 150 is replaced by 360"
Motive:
According to our current labor legislation, overtime is exceptionally allowed, and the duration of overtime in one calendar year for one worker or employee cannot exceed 150 hours. This legal norm has been in effect since the beginning of 1993. With changes to the Labor Code since the end of 1992, this norm was increased from 120 hours to 150 hours and has not been changed since then, despite the changed economic conditions.
The proposal made by the Confederation of Employers and Industrialists in Bulgaria after agreement in the Human Resources Committee of KRIB and at the insistence of companies - our members, is to increase this duration from 150 hours to 360 hours maximum duration of overtime work, which a worker or employee may work within one calendar year, subject to other conditions related to the requirements for authorizing overtime work.
Our proposal is in full compliance with both the EU Directives regulating the organization of working time and the ILO Conventions ratified by us regarding working hours and the observance of a continuous minimum inter-day and inter-week rest and the conditions for performing additional work, as well as and with the principle of protecting the safety and health of workers.
The proposal was made in accordance with the practices in Central and Eastern Europe, where the envisaged threshold is significantly higher than that in the Republic of Bulgaria. For example, in Romania the regulated threshold for the maximum duration of overtime work within a calendar year is 360 hours, for the Czech Republic this threshold is 416 hours, for Hungary 200 hours, neighboring Greece has no limit, etc.
Our reason for making such a proposal is exclusively due to the fact that more and more investors in the Bulgarian market have plans to expand their production capacities in connection with the increased demand, especially in the field of fast moving goods. Investments in new equipment and machinery are protected based on the ability to fully load their capacities, as well as reach maximum productivity. In many cases, this requires switching to continuous operation mode. Continuous 8-hour shift work generates additional overtime hours from which workers could earn extra, and the employer benefits from maintaining high productivity and efficiency as a result of maintaining a constant team composition.
For example, in the food industry, small teams of 5-6 workers work on production lines. The efficiency and productivity of the production line is highly dependent on good communication and the constant composition of these teams. When working in three shifts and a seven-day work week, there is a need for more work shifts per week. When maintaining several permanent teams of workers and cumulative calculation of working hours results in either not covering one work shift or maintaining a team that would not be fully utilized and loaded. In order to maintain a continuous work process, in most cases employers are forced to constantly change the composition of people in teams to meet legal requirements, which negatively affects productivity.
We believe that such a legal change is extremely imperative and will create better investment conditions in the country. In addition, we believe that many companies, which currently due to legal restrictions are forced not to fully declare overtime to the General Labor Inspectorate, due to exceeding the legal limit, /mainly for purely technological reasons rather than a reluctance to comply with the law/, will be able to come out into the light. Such legal restrictions, which do not correspond to real life, are not only an obstacle for the individual employer, but are also to the detriment of workers and employees and do not guarantee one of the basic principles of employment, namely the protection of the safety and health of workers.
Increasing the length of overtime that can exceptionally be worked by one worker or employee within a calendar year will first expose employers who are forced to hide overtime, create an opportunity for greater hiring flexibility at work, will create greater security for the individual worker performing overtime work, as it will be regulated and accordingly announced in the GIT. It will also remove a number of obstacles for the labor inspectorate to carry out effective control.
http://www.turbulence.tech