Culture Minister Pedro Adão e Silva said on Monday that employers “have a responsibility” to comply with the Statute of Culture Professionals and that employees will have to calculate the benefits of participating in this legal regime.
At a press conference in Lisbon, on the reinforcement of the funds for sustainable support of the arts, Pedro Adão e Silva also spoke about the application of the Statute of Cultural Professionals, taking into account that last week the government approved a decree-law amending that statute, with the entities representing the sector regretting that they were not informed of its adoption.
Pedro Adão e Silva explained on Monday that the decree-law only has one “surgical amendment” that has to do with “a mechanism for communicating contracts, which is no longer in place at the time of signing the contract and becomes quarterly. And a correction of a change that was in percentage and should have been in percentage points”.
This “surgical change” is intended to “facilitate communication on the employer side of the service contracts they enter into,” he said..
According to Pedro Adão e Silva, in the timetable for the application of the statute, which came into force on January 1, it is in the “phase of registering employees and adapting employers to the new procedures and new rules, which take effect on 1 October, namely the contributing obligations”.
Last week, approached by the Lusa agency, three representative structures of cultural workers were surprised by the adoption of the decree-law amending the statute and said they were not aware of the contents of the document, because they only had access to a proposal . sent by the Ministry of Culture at the beginning of September with a request for advice.
According to the representatives contacted, the main proposed change to the statute concerned the entities that employed the employees.
“As far as we know, [o decreto-lei] changes the presumption and obligation of contracting authorities to prove that the employee to whom services are requested is in fact a green receipt or not. It’s no longer a concern. […] Now the responsibility of Social Security rests on who wants the boss. This is the direct path to the end of the statute’s usefulness,” Cena-STE’s Rui Galveias told Lusa.
“It is not a detail. It was the only instrument of the statute that was intended to combat false green receipts, which is one of the main reasons for the insecurity and lack of social protection in the sector,” emphasized Amarílis Felizes of the Plateia Association.
The minister recalled on Monday that “employers have a responsibility to comply with the statute and employees will have to calculate the benefits of complying with the statute”.
Pedro Adão e Silva also stressed that the statute, “to protect more cultural workers, depends on more resources”, stating that this legal regime, approved in the previous legislature, “must find support in the resources allocated to culture ” .
In this sense, Pedro Adão e Silva believes that the 2023 state budget will “start a cycle in which the priority for culture is firm and will receive budget translation,” he said.
Source: DN
