Work Hard and Be Silent!

My neighbor in the stairwell, Ilyas Samedov, who came from Gandja to Baku to find a job, does not know weekends. The foreman of a building site, where he works as a painter, requires a daily job. In addition, the working day is not standardized, it lasts until late. No persuasion or references to the Labor Code apply to him.

The boss has his own argument: you need to take the object before the end of the summer, and if you do not want to, go away and find another job, if you can. Therefore dozens of workers are silent, working for ten hours a day.

"You can, of course, write a complaint to the Confederation of Trade Unions or government agencies, but will this help? They will come, fine the foreman, then everything will continue in the same way. And you will be fired under an article. Throughout the country in construction sites such mess and lawlessness reigns," said Ilyas on my proposal to make a collective complaint.

Is this really the case in all construction projects? The topic offered to users caused a flurry of responses in social networks, and outlined the situation in the field of protecting the labor rights of citizens in our country.

"Builders in Azerbaijan often work in inhuman conditions. They do not work for eight hours, but work until dark. They have no days off. They even live on a construction site - in boardwalks, without any comfort. They are paid as much as the owner wants, and sometimes they are not paid at all,| the teacher Kamil Babazadeh wrote.

"To timely pass a profitable object and meet the budget, employers are ready to turn a blind eye to safety technology and the law. They find money to buy land for construction, pay designers, buy materials, advertise the project, and do not find means for working clothes, personal protective equipment, or organization of everyday life," Sardar Mammadov, freight forwarder of a trading company said.

"The worst thing is that today many people agree to any, even slavish working conditions. They have no other way out - they need to feed the family. And employers use this circumstance and so the people have to work hard and keep silent. This indicates that a new stage in the development of capitalism has come. After all, in the days of the first cooperatives, relations with workers were built in a human way. That's how we live," Ilgar Manafov, a designer of a construction company noted.

According to the press service of the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection, according to Articles 89 and 90 of the Labor Code, the working week in the country cannot exceed 40 hours with a five-day working schedule. And with a six-day work schedule, the employer should not delay workers for more than seven hours, and on the last day - six hours. At the end of 2016, the country recorded about 12 thousand violations of labor legislation. These violations concern the absence of labor contracts, delays in salaries, and illegal dismissals.

So, the duration of the working week, as the law says, is 40 hours or 8 hours a day. The norm is as it is, but the reality is completely different. According to the results of the Center for Sociological Monitoring, every third resident of the country works more than 40 hours a week. 33.2% of the employed in the private sector work more than 46 hours a week, and 17.5% - about 50 hours. In total, for 60% of the employed, the real duration of their working week reaches 43-48 hours instead of the officially accepted 40. For comparison: in France, the working week lasts only 39.1 hours, and in Germany it is 35-36 hours.

According to the sociologist Aysel Gurbanova, in conditions of large-scale unemployment people often find themselves in a situation when they are forced to work overtime. Most of all, those who are engaged in services, construction, transport, and agriculture work too much. Employers ignore the requirements of the law, preferring to pay a minor fine and then compensating this amount with extra time of their workers. As research has shown, employees actually present more than half of the "extra" working hours to their employers, not receiving in return either overtime pay, or time off, or increase in leave.

What is the way out? An effective way is to apply hourly wage, by the way, widely practiced in the West. This opinion was expressed to Turan IA by the head of the League for the Protection of Workers" Rights Sahib Mammadov. According to him, the introduction of a new payroll formula will minimize overtime, since the employer will have to pay for excess hours. In addition, the salaries of all citizens employed in the economy, rather than individual categories of employees of the public sector, will significantly increase. Hourly pay will give employers more opportunities to plan the working day of their subordinates. In other words, there will be flexibility in planning working hours, which is important in the face of the economic crisis. The employer in this case can reduce the number of hours of work of his employees and pay less to them - it is still better than firing staff. -0-