Don’t rush to throw work records in the Kura River!

"This explanation aroused resentment of all sober-minded people in Georgia who phoned to our office saying: by that logic we must get rid of Diplomas of higher education obtained before the arrival of Saakashvili in 2003? And all those who own them are Russian agents? It's an outrage!", - Shatberashvili says in indignation.

The government explains that the system of employment sheets and work records is obsolete, and the private sector has been going without them for a long time already. Besides, a duly filled in document with stamps and signatures does not cost much in Georgia.

If it's the fraud issue it has to be solved by introduction of protection levels. And abolition of work records, as the Laborists believe, will lead to cancellation of extra payments for the time in service and decrease in elderly people's income that is ridiculously low without that.

"For a long time in Georgia all pensioners received an equal pension of GEL 55 (nearly USD 25). But on our request a few months ago the government introduced extra payments. They are very small, it's true: GEL 2 for five years of service, GEL 10 for 15 years and so on. Now all that gets abolished. And nobody will be able to define a person's time in service without a work record", - Shatberashvili says.

Introducing certificates from employers, as the draft law authors suggest referring to the Western experience, many employees will simply be unable to find roots, the Labor party believes.

"Many Soviet enterprises where the pensioners could apply for a certificate are simply gone. Many archives were lost in 1991-1993 wars. And there are lots of companies in the territory of Abkhazia and South Ossetia where Georgians are not allowed!"- GeorgiaTimes interlocutor remarked.

The Labor party doesn't mind bringing the Labor Code in line with the Western standards but not through discrimination of pensioners. "We must modify a number of provisions of the law. There is no vacation pay in Georgia, no maternity leaves. Our labor laws are slavish. We must introduce some state services existent in the West that nobody is going to nullify", - Shatberashvili underlined.

He says it doesn't mean "throwing work records in the Kura River". After all there can be some electronic files with information stored in them.

"We jumped from communism to capitalism, but our capitalism is wild, absolutely different from what they have in Sweden or Holland, and we must render it more civilized", - Shatberashvili thinks.

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Svetlana Bolotnikova