Yes, the pesky state sets minimum breaks, maximum weekly hours, minimum wage, anti-discrimination law, anti-bullying law, minimum age to work, minimum safety requirements.
It would be a much better world if our neighbours 9 year old was sent down to the local pencil factory every night for six hours and ay weekends to pick up the pencils that ocassionally fly out of the machine into those hard to reach areas between the conveyor belts and sharpening machines. He could make a few dollars a day and pay for his own food and clothes!
Yes. Once your country catches with the rest of developed world then yes you can have slack to have nice things such as all those minimum standards you mentioned. But with this Portugal will remain a back water coutry forever. I have friends that were telling me 10 years ago that Portugal will be the California of Europe. Nice weather welcoming culture, education going up. Who would not want to set up office there?? Nop, I told them. Portugal is the Mexico of Europe. You get taxed to death and anyone without connections but with ability just emigrantes.
Why don't you go to Bangladesh and ask them to set minimum wage laws and maximum working hours? It would help Portugal more than this law, but not so sure about Bangladesh...
I'm Portuguese btw and know very well what I'm talking about. Just crossing the border to Spain makes big difference in a young guy's prospects in life.
I am generally against worker protection for things that are voluntarily agreed on.
The problem is that bosses can sneakily introduce things that weren't agreed on, and this is usually bad for the worker because the worker has less power in the relationship, there are frictions to switching jobs, they have leverage over your reputation, and resolving the dispute via government or the courts is impractical and expensive.
This can be thought of as a type of mild fraud, where two parties came to a contractual agreement that one party then violated (or perhaps it's a grey area that wasn't explicitly covered contractually).
This is why everyone should be in favor of some basic level of worker protection. Even if you're a hard libertarian - as they are purportedly against fraud, too.
It is not so much about hard libertarianism than practical libertarianism. All these protections look good on paper but they will only set Portugal back at this stage. One more Kafkaesque rule and regulation to keep track of. It only sounds like a innocent simple rule, but add it to all the existing ones. Everytime you talk with a Portuguese company owner, the first 40min of any discussion is him explaining why such and such can't be done because of law xyz and taxes here and there for things that would make total sense in another country but are just not worth it trying to do them in Portugal. More than once I had the reaction "oh my friend, here is not so simple, I wish, I know, we are screwed" and the thing is the people I talk to are as smart as anyone outside the country, but the amount of CPU time just devoted to navigate all the made complexity is just completely crazy. 14 monthly salaries, worker food subsidy, travel subsidy, now special payment for internet and electricity, plus Sweden level taxes etc etc etc.
The topic of receiving boss messages out of work hours was no hot topic at all in Portugal. Only on the minds of politicians who are more attuned to the concerns of managerial classes in Brussels than in Portugal.
Elections are coming in 2022, one more reason for them to fire more populist laws like one.
One more measure to keep Portugal the eternal cheap beach destination serving wealthy foreigners (read average working class from Germany or Holland) in holiday resorts and restaurants in our lovely sunny cities.
Considering only the money aspect it can be worthwhile.
The problem that I have seen with people trying to take advantage of lower taxes for expats is that you can't easily find jobs that pay well. So even with lower taxes your net salary is not as high if are coming from an northern European coutry or US.
It's better done through government, as is minimum wage and other worker protections. Unions have systematic downsides that are avoided if worker protection is achieved via government.
