Amazing stories of labor inspections

Labor inspectors in Greece report situations that beat even the most imaginative screenwriter of crime series, a result of those striving to avoid the checks and significant fines for the circumvention of labor legislation. This is due to entrepreneurs who have got used to not paying, thereby distorting the competition and surviving at the expense of the healthy businesses that operate in the same industry.

Immigrants hidden in coffins, underage workers in chicken coops, uninsured people piled into refrigerators with temperatures below zero, threats, swearing and attempts to deceive make up the “normal” workday of inspectors in the Labor Inspection Squad, without this meaning that all those inspected are fraudsters, extortionists and illegal.

There are thousands of legitimate employers who abide by the labor law and stoically accept scrutiny, but those who break the law usually try, either by word or deed, to get away with it.

Last year the squad carried out 73,579 inspections (almost 13% more than the 65,286 in 2022), and imposed 16,049 administrative sanctions (against 14,504 in 2022) and 44.6 million euros in fines (from €36 million in 2022).

The historical high number of inspections on an annual basis essentially coincides with the time that the Labor Inspection Squad has been operating as an independent authority, since February 2023, but the experience of the inspectors is long-standing.

They are now armed with technological tools, such as tablets, with which 100% of the checks are now carried out by the inspection teams and which act as power multipliers for the speed of recording the results of each check. As they state to Kathimerini, kudos to the squad’s workers, who in the vast majority now feel that they can do their work with transparency and validity.

After all, the risk analysis system also plays a vital role, increasing the effectiveness of controls and resulting in an increase in delinquency of the selected companies to 50.34%, while without its use, according to data from previous years, it had amounted to 25%.