Page 202 - Mellinato, Giulio, and Aleksander Panjek. Eds. 2022. Complex Gateways. Labour and Urban History of Maritime Port Cities: The Northern Adriaticin a Comparative Perspective. Koper: University of Primorska Press.
P. 202
plex Gateways
ment contracts and safety rules, and the submission of workers to the so-
called ‘gazda’, i.e. the ‘owners’ of subcontracting companies (Kovač 2017).
Koper Port workers proceeded, therefore, on two parallel tracks under
very different conditions: direct employees with a significantly higher
salary than all the workers of other state-owned companies in the coun-
try and the third-party IPS workers with wages halved or reduced to a
third of those of direct workers.
According to data provided by the former chairman of the board of
Luka Koper, Dragomir Matić, in 2016 the company managing the port
had issued 1,237 operating permits within the port even though, in fact,
600 to 740 employees operated every day within the third-party struc-
ture (A. S. 2017). The workers – the trade unions revealed – earned only 3
to 4 euros per hour and needed to work as many as 300 hours per month
to make a living, otherwise the owners would consider them bad work-
ers. The gap between the number of permits and actual attendance was
probably due to the need to always have a reserve of labour available to
respond to peaks in work. However it contributed to strengthening the
positions of the ‘gazdas’ that they could, with the threat of using other
workers, lower protection advantages and wages.
Luka Koper d.d. had been using third-party IPS manpower since
1995 but, even though IPS workers often performed the same type of
work as direct employees, they had much lower wages, fewer rights, and
less protection. However, Slovenian legislation provides that the supply
of labour can only be carried out by administration agencies, while the
IPS third-party companies should have dealt exclusively with commercial
collaboration. For this reason, in 2017, following a series of checks carried
out by the Labour Inspectorate, Luka Koper d.d. was prohibited from us-
ing workers from the IPS Encon company and in 2017, the Administrative
Court of Ljubljana confirmed the decision. In this case, in fact, it would be
a form of circumvention of the legislation on the regulation of the labour
market, which allows the supply of labour only to employers with appro-
priate authorizations, and subjected to adequate controls (Ministrstvo za
delo, družino, socialne zadeve in enake možnosti 2016; IUS-INFO 2017).
From the judgment it emerged that the port service providers carried out
their duties in the port in such a way as to configure the standards of an
employment relationship. This means that they performed their servic-
es under the control and directives of Luka Koper d.d. and were includ-
ed in the work process in the same way as employees. In contrast, Luka
202
ment contracts and safety rules, and the submission of workers to the so-
called ‘gazda’, i.e. the ‘owners’ of subcontracting companies (Kovač 2017).
Koper Port workers proceeded, therefore, on two parallel tracks under
very different conditions: direct employees with a significantly higher
salary than all the workers of other state-owned companies in the coun-
try and the third-party IPS workers with wages halved or reduced to a
third of those of direct workers.
According to data provided by the former chairman of the board of
Luka Koper, Dragomir Matić, in 2016 the company managing the port
had issued 1,237 operating permits within the port even though, in fact,
600 to 740 employees operated every day within the third-party struc-
ture (A. S. 2017). The workers – the trade unions revealed – earned only 3
to 4 euros per hour and needed to work as many as 300 hours per month
to make a living, otherwise the owners would consider them bad work-
ers. The gap between the number of permits and actual attendance was
probably due to the need to always have a reserve of labour available to
respond to peaks in work. However it contributed to strengthening the
positions of the ‘gazdas’ that they could, with the threat of using other
workers, lower protection advantages and wages.
Luka Koper d.d. had been using third-party IPS manpower since
1995 but, even though IPS workers often performed the same type of
work as direct employees, they had much lower wages, fewer rights, and
less protection. However, Slovenian legislation provides that the supply
of labour can only be carried out by administration agencies, while the
IPS third-party companies should have dealt exclusively with commercial
collaboration. For this reason, in 2017, following a series of checks carried
out by the Labour Inspectorate, Luka Koper d.d. was prohibited from us-
ing workers from the IPS Encon company and in 2017, the Administrative
Court of Ljubljana confirmed the decision. In this case, in fact, it would be
a form of circumvention of the legislation on the regulation of the labour
market, which allows the supply of labour only to employers with appro-
priate authorizations, and subjected to adequate controls (Ministrstvo za
delo, družino, socialne zadeve in enake možnosti 2016; IUS-INFO 2017).
From the judgment it emerged that the port service providers carried out
their duties in the port in such a way as to configure the standards of an
employment relationship. This means that they performed their servic-
es under the control and directives of Luka Koper d.d. and were includ-
ed in the work process in the same way as employees. In contrast, Luka
202
