The Constitutional Court Should Expedite Decisions on the Sunday Work Ban

I was at the Avenue Mall shopping center in Zagreb with my family on Sunday. My wife only told me in the car that she expected a large crowd. I didn’t respond, although I wasn’t happy after those words. She was right – the crowd was already at the entrance to the garage because Avenue Mall was the only place open in Zagreb that Sunday. The first such Sunday already showed us what this year’s consequences of last year’s Trade Act, which prohibits work on that day, except for sixteen Sundays a year, will be.

Crowds will be a problem for us consumers: for my wife, who covers the shopping sector in our family (because she needs to keep track of store schedules and what to buy), and then for me as the operator (read: the main carrier of purchased goods) because I will have to push through people with loaded goods on my back to get to the car.

Although my family, like all consumers, is on the other side of the barricade, I believe that it is much harder for retailers in this case. Especially for the small ones. Because, as the president of the Entrepreneurs’ Voice Association, Hrvoje Bujas (Index.hr portal), says, ‘retail chains will always be able to find a model under which one of their branches can operate on Sundays. A bakery or a flower shop has no alternative. They will work those sixteen Sundays, and not the others.’

Half a Year of Waiting

The arguments of the government and retailers regarding this issue are already known to a large part of the public, so I will not repeat them. The question is whose arguments the Constitutional Court will deem stronger. Retailers submitted a request to that court last year for a review of the constitutionality of the Sunday work ban, convinced that it would be abolished for the third time. I must say that I, with the caveat that I am not a legal expert, believe that there are strong arguments for abolishing that ban.

I do not think that one of the stronger arguments is that retail chains will lose a lot of money (the small ones will), the issue is discrimination in relation to other activities that work on Sundays and are not as essential (for example, restaurants). I expressed my opinion on this matter previously on these pages. But the Constitutional Court is currently silent on this.

When I say it is silent, I do not claim that it is doing nothing about it. Of course, a decision could not be made immediately because its judges, along with all their other tasks, need time to study the material and the arguments of the opposing sides, but it seems to me that this issue is so important that a decision on it should be one of the priorities.

Bujas says that retailers have been waiting for the Constitutional Court’s decision for half a year, but so far there are no indications that it will be made soon. Reading that Index article, he may seem nervous even though he himself expects the ban to be lifted for the third time. As a reason for why the decision is not being made, he points out that it seems to him that they are waiting for an election year and that someone is trying to gain cheap political points from it.

– And I do not expect that the constitutional judges will do their job and suppress that ridiculous law, all just to somehow appease the political establishment – Bujas stated for Index.hr.

Sixth Gear

I understand his nervousness because time is passing, and time is, as business people have long said – money. After all, one evening on television, a small Dalmatian retailer said that he would take the risk and work all sixteen Sundays in the first four months because he expects the Constitutional Court to lift the ban by then. Otherwise, he said, it wouldn’t be worth it for him. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, it may not be the wisest to make such statements about constitutional judges, especially since I am not sure they are accurate.

Or am I too naive, although I am aware that these judges came to their positions thanks to political compromises between the ruling party and the opposition. Still, I repeat, judges need some time to weigh the arguments, but I agree that it is already time to ask them to shift into fifth gear and decide whether this time it was third time lucky for the Croatian government or if the Croatian Parliament again passed a law that is not in accordance with the Constitution at its proposal. It would be good to know this at least by mid-spring.

POST SCRIPTUM

That something is not right with the Sunday work ban is also shown by the government’s decision that last year on All Saints’ Day, November 1, florists could work. It referred to Article 57, paragraph 3 of the Trade Act, which states that the government can determine by decision which sales facilities are required to operate on public holidays. How stretched that interpretation is, is clear from the fact that that article provides for the obligation of stores to work on holidays (they are required to work), not an option of whether they want to work or not. The Ministry of Finance then concluded that none of the florists is obliged to work, which is at least strange. In fact, the government has once again derogated that law with its act, which it stubbornly insists on, like others, as we recently wrote in Lider.