Direct Request (CEACR) - adopted 2013, published 103rd ILC session (2014)

Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 (No. 87) - Cabo Verde (Ratification: 1999)

Article 3 of the Convention. Right of workers’ organizations to organize their activities and formulate their programmes. For several years the Committee has been asking the Government to amend the following provisions of the law:

• – section 114(2) of the Labour Code, to ensure that where a vote is held for the purpose of deciding on a strike (where workers are not represented by a union), only the votes cast are counted;
• – section 120, subparagraph 2 of the Labour Code, which allows an employer to conclude a contract with another enterprise for the supply of goods or services immobilized as a result of a strike, in order to limit the application of this provision to essential services in the strict sense of the term or public services of fundamental importance, in the event of an acute national or local crisis or non-observance of freely negotiated minimum services;
• – sections 123 and 127 of the Labour Code, so that any disagreement between the parties as to the minimum services to be provided during a strike are settled by an independent body and that recourse to civil requisitioning orders is confined to cases in which the minimum services established by the parties or an independent body, as the case may be, are not respected.

The Committee notes that following a request from the Government for support in giving effect to the Committee’s comments on this point, the Office conducted a mission and a tripartite seminar in 2012 and 2013 in the context of a technical assistance programme. In this connection the Committee notes the following information from the Government: (i) the ILO mission, supported by the Ministry of Youth, Employment and Human Resources Development, proved essential in securing better inclusion and understanding of the concepts of strike and civil requisitioning in social dialogue; (ii) the Council of Ministers gave a positive assessment of the results of the mission and, following the mission, noted with particular interest the recommendations made by the tripartite constituents as regards: building the bargaining technique capacity of the social partners present in essential services; promoting, in essential services, the collective negotiation of minimum services before the onset of collective disputes; implementing the recommendations of the Committee on Freedom of Association and establishing an independent body to be responsible for settling disputes over minimum services and composed of workers’ and employers’ representatives from the public and the private sectors; (iii) following a tripartite seminar in 2013, the social partners recommended that the establishment of such a body be discussed at the next meeting of the Council for Social Partnership and specified that the composition of the body should be bipartite, obey the principles of impartiality and neutrality and include recognized experts from the sectors concerned. They stressed that the solution proposed does not exclude the possibility for the Government to order civil requisitioning in cases where the minimum services decided on by the parties or an independent body are not respected; (iv) certain sectors were identified for the launching of negotiations on the content of minimum services in October 2013; and (v) the Government undertakes to implement the recommendations of the social partners through the labour administration.

The Committee welcomes the initiatives conducted with technical support from the Office and hopes that it will be able to note from the Government’s next report that there has been tangible progress in bringing the legislation into line with the Convention. The Committee requests the Government to report any developments in this regard.