Gov't spokesman Petsas on new development bill: Regulations will support full-time employment

Speaking to journalist Nikos Chadzinikolaou, Petsas said "the government is trying to support full-time work in order to reduce part-time and work rotation through interventions in the bill that Labor Minister Yiannis Vroutsis has announced and described."

"We want to have more people who work at legal jobs, not at undeclared labor," Petsas said, "so their rights can be protected, they may join unions, and participate and express their opinions through their own institutional instruments."

Asked to respond to opposition criticism that the government plans to abolish collective labor agreements, the spokesman said there's no such issue, but that dysfunctional companies on the brink of bankruptcy "are allowed to diverge from general regulations, with the agreement of their employees."

Speaking on the migration issue, the government spokesman said that inflows of migrants should be limited at the source, the Turkish coast in particular, and called on Turkey to do whatever it can to apply the EU-Turkey Statement of 2016.

He also noted that "the issue is more of a migration one, not a refugee one," as current data show that refugees from areas in war are very low. "From a clearly refugee issue it was in 2015-2016, it gradually became a refugee/migrant issue, and now relates much more to migration than to people seeking asylum," Petsas said.

"Turkey is trying to do whatever it can to restrict inflows, while our own measures are starting to pay off," he said, adding that as the main tourist season wraps up and the coast guard can deploy more boats to patrol the borders, Greek authorities will be able to alert Turkish authorities about dinghies about to set off, he added.

Petsas said that in terms of migration, the Greek public has been exhausted by the issue that was not resolved in 4.5 years, he said. "We did nothing more than put to action what we told the Greeks before elections, four basic things: We will guard our borders; we will accelerate the process of accepting or rejecting an asylum application; we will set up controlled pre-departure centers and we will increase the return" of people whose refugee applications were rejected.