Interior Minister Sandor Pinter has agreed to pay for extra hours worked by firefighters between 2004 and 2007. Pinter agreed with Budapest Mayor Istvan Tarlos, Zsolt Borkai of Gyor in northwestern Hungary and Karoly Szita of Kaposvar in southwestern Hungary that the three local councils and the ministry will start transferring unpaid wages. In the first step, 50% of the amount due, plus interest, will be transferred to those still in service. The remainder will be paid before the end of the year, the ministry said. The firefighters have been calling for years for the transfer of their unpaid wages for the period between 1 May in 2004, when Hungary joined the EU, and the end of 2007. They have filed for court cases and the Supreme Court ruled several times that their claims were justified. Pressure was added on 16 April, when around 10,000 firefighters, police officers, soldiers and customs officers took part in a national demonstration in Budapest in protest against the government’s continuing austerity measures. A key focus was to defend pension rights but unions were also calling for wage increases after a lengthy period of pay freezes.
English: Máté Komiljovics, union correspondent;
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/04/16/uk-hungary-demonstration
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This article was published in the Collective Bargaining Newsletter. It aims to facilitate information exchange between trade unions and to support the work of ETUC's collective bargaining committee. For more information, please contact the editor Maarten van Klaveren, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) M.vanKlaveren@uva.nl. You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org, and on the AIAS at www.uva-aias.net. © ETUI aisbl, Brussels 2011.