The misadventures of the European Social Charter in Greece

Résumé

Greece has signed and ratified the ESC and all its amending and additional protocols. Nevertheless, the implementation of the Charter rights was found to be on a rough path. Specifically in the era of the tripartite creditors’ administration (“the Troika”) of the country’s economic affairs (2010-2019) Parliament was forced to pass measures, so called austerity measures, in overt violation of many fundamental employment rights enshrined in the Charter. This led to the delivery of decisions of non-conformity by the ECSR on relevant collective complaints filed by representative domestic trade unions against the Greek State. The latter could not escape the negative outcome of the proceedings, by asserting that the Government had not acted of its own free will but that they were forced to enact such measures under the creditors’ threat of the country’s going bankrupt. In 2016 the country ratified the rev. ESC. Nevertheless, as shown in the case of implementation of article 24 on the principle of dismissal only with a valid reason, the Greek legal practice, even after the Troika had left the country, could not absorb the function and the scope of values underlying social rights, mainly due to the unreadiness of the involved legal circles, but also on the account of the   recently dominant neoliberal shift in the country.