Speaking on Skai television, Labour and Social Security Minister Niki Kerameos discussed the extension of the Digital Work Card to new sectors, a bill being drafted to improve working conditions for platform workers, and targeted measures to boost employment.
Ms Kerameos said the Digital Work Card was being extended to 500,000 additional workers, bringing the number of workers covered by the scheme to 2.5 million.
She said new sectors were being included, such as telecommunications, healthcare and employment, as well as smaller businesses such as hairdressers and dry cleaners. Consulting and advertising firms, repair services and logistics will follow next month.
The minister highlighted three key benefits of the measure:
“First, workers’ earnings rise because every hour you work is recorded, and so you are paid for it. Second, competition between businesses is put on a much sounder footing. Third, revenues for the social security funds also increase significantly, which leads to what is known as fiscal space,” she said.
She added that last year alone, the Digital Work Card recorded 2.7 million more overtime hours than the previous year.
In this context, Ms Kerameos referred to the end of cuts to survivors’ pensions and the permanent annual €400 payment each November, explaining:
“It is paid at the end of November, with no longer any asset or income limits, and so on, to all pensioners over 65 and to everyone over 60 who receives only a survivors’ pension. The measure began last Easter with €250 and a much smaller number of pensioners benefiting. Then we raised it to €300, and now it is €400. How did we achieve this? Because fiscal space was created, and one key way to create fiscal space is the Digital Work Card.”
Referring to a new Labour Ministry bill on the use of artificial intelligence in the labour market, the minister said that AI was a useful tool for boosting productivity, but that its use in workforce management required limits and safeguards.
“There are businesses today, the so-called platforms, where every aspect of workers’ jobs — what projects they take on, which deliveries they handle, whether they are promoted or their collaboration is terminated — is governed solely by artificial intelligence. There needs to be a limit, there needs to be human oversight, and you need to know what goes into the algorithm’s black box,” the minister said.
“This bill is coming forward and does two main things. First, it introduces transparency requirements: we need to know what is inside this black box and what it calculates. It calculates response times and the star ratings customers give me afterwards. It also makes human oversight mandatory for certain critical decisions,” she continued.
“This is a new bill, then, stemming from a European directive. It is the first time we have set what I would call clear boundaries in the labour market. I should say that, as with every bill I bring forward, it is always preceded by very thorough consultation. Artificial intelligence is very useful; we should not be afraid of technology, but it is the state’s responsibility to set limits too,” she added.
On efforts to boost employment, Ms Kerameos said that unemployment stood at 7.4%, just 0.1 percentage point above the lowest level ever recorded in the country, while more and more businesses were looking for workers.
She noted that there was still scope to increase employment further, particularly among women and in the regions.
Referring to a subsidised employment scheme for remote work in remote municipalities across the country, which provides a 90% subsidy for wages and social security contributions for one year, she said:
“We want to give people living in mountainous areas and remote municipalities an incentive to work remotely and stay in their area. So we are essentially opening up a new pool of potential workers, but only for one year.”
“Why for one year? Because we want to give it a boost. The aim is obviously not to provide subsidies indefinitely, but we want to open up a new pool. So this is an effort to boost employment, particularly in the regions and especially in the country’s mountainous municipalities, where access to the labour market is objectively more difficult.”
Finally, Ms Kerameos said that in the first nine months of 2026, 76,000 people found work through programmes run by the Labour Ministry and the Public Employment Service (DYPA), a figure equivalent to the population of a city such as Katerini.
She added that the vast majority remain in work after the programmes end.
“Because our goal, I’ll say it plainly, is a society of workers. Not a society of unemployed people,” the minister stressed.
Asked to comment on opinion polls, the minister described them as a useful tool that captures a particular moment, stressing that there was no room for complacency and that the priority remained delivering on the government’s 2023 commitments, for which it would be held accountable in 2027.
“Our job is to try every day, with every action we take, to make people’s daily lives better,” she said, also referring to the thousands of people who attended the Career Day held last Saturday.