“The 133,907 new jobs for April are the largest number for the month of April ever in the country,” the minister said, and clarified that the majority of their posts are full -time and are involved in majority women and young people.

“Over 2 out of 3 of these new jobs are full -time. The majority also concerns women, very important. Why? Because we have higher unemployment for women and therefore we are interested in boosting more employment in women. And what else do we need? We need more young people in the job market. 66% of these new jobs are in people under 45. ”

As the Minister pointed out, 75,000 of the new jobs are tourism and focus, while stressing the importance of the vacancies in the sectors to be communicated to the public employment service to help pay them.

Ms. Kerameos, answering a question, confirmed the reduction of unemployment in April to 8.3%, which is the lowest of the last 17 years and has resulted in our country having lower unemployment than Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Spain.

Work card

For the digital work card, the minister stressed that it is currently protecting 1.5 million workers and particularly referring to tourism, noting that the first month of universal implementation of the measure in the industry was spent by a spectacular increase in overtime declared by 637%. As she herself explained, the implementation of the measure benefits workers who are paid for their real working time, benefits healthy competition between businesses and society itself as public revenue returns to citizens as a dividend by the state.

The minister also referred to April’s total data in tourism, catering, industry and retailing, noting that 110,000 more hours of overtime were declared than the previous April. “The number is huge and these overtime were somewhere before,” the minister said.

Digitization of stamps

At the same time, Ms. Kerameos highlighted the digitization of the handwritten stamps made by E -EFKA using artificial intelligence, with 53 million tabs being digitally archived in their entirety. “All of this is shaped into a digital archive to make auxiliary pensions much faster. We have already edited 27 million pages. We have 26 million pages to complete the project.

In the end of ’25 the scan will be over, all this will now be put into operation. At the same time, and a system by which you will enter and in a picture you will see what concerns you with regard to your insurance. All this with one goal. We want to be useful. Useful in society. Whatever we do, we want to make the lives of citizens better, ”Ms Kerameos said.

Concerning collective agreements, the Minister pointed out that two criteria must be met, first an institutional framework that is pushing for collective agreements and secondly the will of the parties, namely representatives of workers and employers, to conclude a collective agreement.

“So in terms of the first part, the institutional framework, at the moment we are talking about, we have a dialogue with all national social partners. Our goal is to have, by the end of the year, has been issued, according to European law, a roadmap on how to strengthen the framework, how to establish more powerful motives to push for the conclusion of collective agreements. A few months ago we passed a law on how the minimum wage would be defined. We want a shield, a threshold, 880 euros today, below which no one will be paid in the country. But employees and employers representatives are absolutely free to agree on something better. Already tourism and bank employees have collective agreements on more favorable working conditions. “