A new regulatory avalanche is rolling in on entrepreneurs. The Ministry of Labour is about to implement the EU Gender Pay Directive. This introduces new bureaucratic obligations for entrepreneurs. They will have to inform about the criteria they apply when setting wages in the company and define the pay procedure so that the employee knows what he or she has to do to get higher pay.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said at Davos that Slovakia could become a country that will experiment with a four-day working week. It is a flattering topic and so several media immediately picked up on it.
It is telling that the public almost unquestioningly believes that the minimum wage helps low-income people in particular. But as the prominent Czech economist Robert Holman writes in his textbook on microeconomics, “If economists agree on anything, it is that legislating a minimum wage increases unemployment.”
At the end of last week, the current proposal for changing the minimum wage level was published. It is interesting for several reasons, mainly because, for the first time, the new mechanism for determining the minimum wage is applied, linking it to the dynamics of the average wage. This, in the context of high inflation and the subsequent rapid growth of wages, leads to its largest nominal increase in the last two decades.
A second initiative to collect signatures to support a petition calling for an unconditional, universal basic income (UBI) for all citizens in the European Union (EU) has ended. The required one million signatures were never reached. Why?
After months of debate, in late 2022, the Lithuanian Parliament passed into law a package of legislative amendments that reforms Lithuania’s migration system. The reform creates more favorable conditions for the recruitment of non-EU nationals.
In line with expectations, the tax burden has therefore fallen compared to last year. In absolute terms, the average employee now pays a curious CZK 666 more per month to the state than last year (not adjusted for inflation), but this is only due to the growth in average wages.
The solutions to combat inflation that Danuše Nerudová proposes are not good ones. A price cap on energy can lead to nothing but shortages. Financially incentivizing households and industry to reduce energy consumption is useless in a world of market prices.
The special purpose law on assistance to citizens of Ukraine in connection with the armed conflict on the territory of Ukraine should take into account the demand for recognition of a significant range of professional qualifications acquired in Ukraine.
Teachers’ salaries are a topic every year. This time, however, it is different. In addition to internal arguments about the state of education, external developments – inflation and the public deficit – also play an important role.
