Joint press conference of GSEVEE, ESEE and OSYE on 3-5-2017 for the operation of the branches on Sundays

On May 3, 2017, at 10:00, a joint press conference will take place at the premises of the ESEE (Mitropoleos 42, 1st floor), ESEE President Vasilis Korkides, GSEVEE President George Kavvathas and the Secretary General of OIE Mr. Panayiotis Kyriakoulia as part of the shaking of Sunday’s liberation.

Our organizations, representing almost all of the country’s trading companies and hundreds of thousands of employees in the Commerce industry, express their unequivocal opposition to any attempt to release the stores on Sundays.

It is obvious that the resumption of the Sunday issue is an initiative of specific business interests of the interior, with lenders actually mediating the demand of large multinational groups, chains, shopping malls and malls.

The objectives are many: to control the market by crushing small and medium-sized enterprises through the establishment of oligopolistic conditions and agreed price and bidding practices, but also to overthrow any conquest and right of workers by imposing and expanding flexible working relationships and generalized employment insecurity.

The experience to date from the Sunday operation of the stores for 8 Sundays a year, as has repeatedly proven our organization’s studies and official statistics, has not contributed to the development efforts of the country, nor to the creation of new jobs. It is undoubtedly a global patent theory that moves, given that the lower income of citizens will increase consumption and thereby increase jobs.

On the contrary, the effect of Sunday’s release is obvious and immediate: even more padlocks, higher rates of real unemployment, more severe recession, even worse crisis. It is regrettable that the substance and the symbolism of the concept of “reform” are once again brutally abused.

We address the Greek society, the citizens of the country, the parties, the enterprises, the productive bodies, the media, the other social partners and we warn the institutions and the government about the negative effects that such regulation will have on the market and the domestic Businesses, while at the same time we point out the institutional deviation that will be noted if this proposal prevails.

Any attempt to release Sunday would be contrary and therefore unconstitutional, according to the recent Plenary Session of the Council of Europe (100/2017) for the pilot liberation of 52 branches in some tourist areas of the country. Moreover, according to the CoE, Sunday is now treated as what is, that is, one day irreplaceable for the very development of the personality of the person and for the family and social bond of both the merchants operating their shops and the workers in them. As such, it can not be substituted by any “closing” or “off” Tuesday, Wednesday or any other day, either for the employer or for the employee.

We urge the government not to resist pressure, defending the hundreds of thousands of businesses and their workers whose survival is a condition for economic recovery and employment at national, regional and local levels.