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- WHAT EXPECTS BELARUSIANS AFTER CHANGING THE LABOR CODE
- Home
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- WHAT EXPECTS BELARUSIANS AFTER CHANGING THE LABOR CODE
WHAT EXPECTS BELARUSIANS AFTER CHANGING THE LABOR CODE
01.10.2021
Important details of the draft Law of the Republic of Belarus “On Amendments to Laws on Labor Relations” were discussed at a meeting of the National Council on Labor Disputes and Social Issues with the participation of representatives of the government of the Republic of Belarus, the Federation of Trade Unions of Belarus and the republican association of employers.
At the stage of drafting the bill, trade unions made a number of proposals to strengthen standards and guarantees for workers. One of them was the issue of providing paid social leave for employees of budgetary organizations.
Today, most collective agreements contain a provision that employees can take additional leave for family and domestic reasons, for example, in connection with a wedding or the birth of a child, and with continued pay. The duration of such leave, as a rule, is from one to three days, however, when implementing this norm in budgetary organizations, questions often arose regarding financing the costs of paying for unplanned leaves. In this regard, trade unions insisted on the need to legislate the possibility for employees of budgetary organizations to receive such leaves with pay.
Other innovations have been introduced into the bill that relate to the procedure for granting vacations. In particular, for those employees who combine work and study.
– At the moment, the employer is obliged to provide an employee who is receiving education in correspondence or evening form, leave for the session only if he himself sent this employee to study. If an employee, on his own initiative, wants to receive an education - vocational, secondary or higher, then it is up to the employer to decide whether to let him go from work for this time or not. This is unfair to an employee who is interested in improving his professional level, noted the Federation of Trade Unions.
In this regard, the bill will establish a different approach - the employer will in any case be obliged to provide leave for education if the employee expresses such a wish.
Certain innovations are also prescribed in relation to the conditions for undergoing medical examination.
Practice has shown that it is not always possible for employees to undergo a medical examination outside of working hours, and employers are often not interested in facilitating this. In this regard, it is proposed to introduce a mandatory norm under which, once every 3 years, young workers have the right to a day off to undergo medical examination and at the same time they retain the average earnings at their place of work. Workers after forty years of age will be released from work while maintaining their average earnings for 1 day, once a year. And those who have 5 years left before the generally established retirement age, and those who have already reached this age, will have to be provided with two days once a year while maintaining their average earnings.
The introduction of the above norm will allow optimizing the procedure for conducting clinical examinations of people of working age, ensuring their quality, increasing the effectiveness of measures taken based on the results of medical examinations and motivating citizens to preserve and strengthen their health.
Prepared by Natalya MARTSINKEVICH
Text material taken from the website of the Federation of Trade Unions of Belarus 1PROF.BY