Jobbik to launch EU wage union signature drive on Aug 20

The opposition Jobbik party will start collecting signatures for its bid to equalise wages throughout the European Union on August 20, the party’s leader said on Saturday.

The European Commission approved a European citizens’ initiative prepared jointly by eight central and eastern European member states in May, giving them the green light to start gathering signatures. The countries participating in the campaign will have one year to collect a total of one million signatures in support of the initiative.

Closing the gap between eastern and western European wages will be Hungary’s most important national strategic issue over the coming decades, Gábor Vona told a press conference in Miskolc, in northeastern Hungary.

He said that if Jobbik won next year’s general election, it would pursue an economic policy “entirely different” from that of ruling Fidesz’s, so that eastern Hungarian wages can catch up to wages in the western part of the country.

Vona said that while the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was “isolating” Hungary, Jobbik was “on the side of the people” making the issue of equal wages a European one and uniting central and eastern Europe for the goal to achieve a wage union.

Source: MTI