According to a Press Release of the Ministry of Labor and Social Insurance, the pilot application of the digital labor card measure in the tourism and food services sectors began on Wednesday 11.09.2024.

It is reminded that the measure is already successfully applied to approximately 750,000 employees of banks, large supermarkets, insurance companies, security companies, DEKO, with the total number of businesses estimated at 73,000.

The employees covered by the digital work card measure, after its extension to food services and tourism sectors, are estimated to total approximately 1,500,000.

The measure is to be fully operational on March 1, 2025, to give sufficient time to businesses operating in the specific sectors (e.g. hotels, accommodation, rooms for rent, camping, catering) to adapt to the new data and to resolve any practical issues.

The Minister of Labor and Social Security, Niki Kerameos, has announced that in the time until the full implementation of the measure, webinars will be held as well as informative actions in many parts of Greece, in collaboration with the representatives of employees and employers. The purpose of the above actions is to inform about the correct application of the digital labor card.

The aim of the digital labor card is to fully safeguard the rights of workers, as it ensures the monitoring of real working time and the remuneration of workers for it, combating abusive policies of undeclared overtime and illegal changes and excesses of working time.

According to the same press release, the effectiveness of the implementation of the measure to date is confirmed by significant increases in declared overtime in the integrated sectors. A typical example is the increase in declared overtime in supermarkets, where from the start of the implementation of the measure until the end of 2023, a cumulative increase of +61.2% was observed.