ECA STATEMENT ON THE RIGHT OF THE WORKING CLASS AND THE POPULAR STRATA TO REST, VACATIONS AND RECREATION

Like the right to work, the right to rest, vacation and leisure is a social right, closely connected to the right to health, since work, rest and recreation are factors of fundamental importance for the replenishment of only part of the labour power consumed by the workers through their brutal exploitation by the employers as well as for their psycho-physical balance.

Even when the right to rest is formally set forth by law, capitalism restricts and even prevents its exercise in various ways, primarily through the unpaid extension of working hours and working life, flexible work and working time arrangements.

The EU bodies bear a serious responsibility for restricting or preventing the right to free time. Directive 2003/88/EC, has raised the maximum average duration of the working week in member countries from 40 to 48 hours, but the bourgeois lobbies and capital sectors are pushing for further extensions or, even, a complete liberalization of working hours. The retirement age is rising in different jurisdictions, also under the direction by the European Commission. The EU regulations and guidelines allow atypical bargaining agreements which may provide for a flexible schedule depending on the production needs of the business owners up to 12 continuous days’ work with no day off, with no wage increases for night or public holiday work, no paid vacations and, often, no paid sick leave, a six-day working week and the abolition of the Sunday holiday. The policy of low wages and pensions, the cuts in or the abolition of the holiday allowance strongly promoted by the EU bodies and the governments in the name of monetary and budgetary stability, along with the cuts in services or their privatization-commercialization in the name of the reduction of public spending, contributes to decreasing the income available to workers to be spent on qualified vacations, practically canceling or drastically constraining the right to rest for the majority of the working class.

Capitalism has transformed the right to rest into an expensive commodity, into a privilege only for those who have enough income both for spending their vacations in a healthy and qualified way, as well as for accessing sport, culture and other recreational activities. The EU legislation fosters the tendency of capital to concentration in such highly profitable business activities as the tourism and leisure industry, and its centralization in the hands of few monopolies of this sector, such as big tour operators, hotels and restaurants chains, airlines and shipping companies, with the consequent formation of high monopolistic prices, while the salaries of employees in the tourism sector, despite its high profitability, are among the lowest, their job among the most insecure, and the amount and conditions of their working hours among the most grueling. The result is the deprivation of quality tourist services for the majority of the working class, on the one hand and the expulsion from the market and the proletarianization of small self-employed in the tourism and hospitality sector on the other hand.

Socialism, for example in the USSR, had a diametrically opposite approach to this issue. The 8-hours working day was established by decree on November 11, 1917, just 4 days after the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. The Soviet power, in order to favor the multilateral, material and spiritual, development of workers' personality, was taking care of reducing working time to increase the quantity and quality of free time. The right to rest, for the first time in history, was established by the so called "Stalin's" 1936 Constitution of the USSR, whose article 119 stated: "Citizens of the USSR have the right to rest. The right to rest is guaranteed by the reduction of the working day for the vast majority of workers up to 7 hours, by the establishment of paid annual vacations for workers and employees, by the provision of a vast network of sanatoriums, vacation homes and clubs for the service of workers". The Soviet Constitution expressly indicated how to make the right to rest effective and concrete through a wide network of facilities that offered a complete bundle of services, from accommodation to meals, from recreational, cultural and sports programs to healthcare, rehabilitation and spa treatment. Moreover, for veterans and "assault workers", the use of these facilities was free of charge, while for all other workers the labor unions covered 50% to 80% of vacation-related costs.

Being aware that, in the context of capitalism, any workers' achievement is never definitive, but liable to be canceled whenever the correlation of forces between the classes changes and that only the revolutionary seizure of political power and its retention by the proletariat make the acquired economic and social rights irreversible, the parties of the European Communist Action develop action in the workplaces to organize the struggle of workers in the tourism and hospitality sectors and to formulate militant demands. They also express their solidarity with workers, calling them to struggle to win their right to a qualified rest and vacation, for:

·         the reduction of working hours at the same wage;

·         the lowering of the retirement age;

·         substantial increases in wages and pensions and their indexation to the cost of living, for guaranteed holiday allowance;

·         the creation of the material conditions for the exercise of the right to vacations, rest and recreation through the provision by the State of specific public accommodation, healthcare-rehabilitative, cultural, recreational and sports facilities and services for workers and their families, in confrontation with the policy of cuts, public spending savings and budgetary rigor pursued so far by the EU and the bourgeois governments of the member states.

The task of the communists is to fight at the forefront of the struggle of the working class for vacation, which is a universal right of the people and not a privilege for the few, and to secure the rights of the workers in the hospitality-tourism sector. The prospect in favour of workers’–people’s interests lies in the struggle for workers’ power, for a centrally planned economy, for socialism, for the transformation of all large hotel and tourist establishments into social property, for a life with contemporary rights to work, leisure and recreation, vacation, health, etc.