Companies confederation boss says union negotiations pointless if they don’t know what they want
The president of the Portuguese Business Confederation (CIP), Armindo Monteiro, said on Thursday that it is “not worth continuing to negotiate an agreement on labour reform if the union UGT does not provide “a clear definition of what needs to be agreed upon.”
The CIP leader challenged the UGT “to indicate what the points are, and what it intends” to reach a final agreement on in the labour law reform, which has been dragging on since July 2025.
The CIP representative was speaking at the end of a meeting with the President of the Republic, António José Seguro, regarding the government’s proposed reform of the labour code, which has entered its final stages without the unions having reached an agreement.
“We are talking about extremely low productivity. It took us nine months to reach a consensus on 130 measures,” added Armindo Monteiro, considering that the last tripartite meeting between the Government, employers, and unions “was not progress, it was a step backward.”
Stressing that labour negotiations “have to end,” the CIP boss admitted, however, that if the UGT “indicates what the points are, and what it wants,” then the CIP “will naturally look” at a possible new proposal.
Armindo Monteiro admitted that the latest agreed-upon version of the labour reform is not the proposal he would have liked, but “it is the proposal that allows us to maintain balance and avoided industrial action.”
He rejected the claim that the labour reform “intends to take away workers’ rights,” and added that “much has been said about what it is not.”
Therefore, he announced that the latest version of the labour proposal was now available on the CIP website, so that “the Portuguese can see what we are talking about.”
He added that the labour negotiations were used for “partisan political purposes” but that, on the part of the CIP, there was a “genuine effort, which will probably not succeed.”
The draft labour legislation reform, “Work XXI,” was presented by the Government on July 24, 2025, entailing a “thorough” revision of the labour law, contemplating more than 100 amendments to the Labor Code.
Source. CIP
