The Lithuanian State Labour Inspectorate (GIT) has begun to publicise employers who commit various violations. Among them are well-known companies, such as Lidl. The heads of the companies that the journalists of the Lithuanian Delfi spoke to were skeptical. They do not like this method of "education": after all, those who made small mistakes are mixed up with those who seriously violated the rules. Others claim that they ended up on the board of shame due to the poor performance of state institutions. GIT recently introduced a new preventive measure to combat dishonest employers: a public list of companies that violate the rules and laws was published. A business that has violated the law even once is put on this list for 1-3 years. The list can be found here. "The GIT website will contain information about all violations by employers-legal entities, if they have been punished by the GIT. Information about employers-individuals will be made public only when they have seriously violated the rules – if they have been punished for illegal work, violation of the procedure for recording working hours and calculating wages," said GIT representative Dalius Čeponas. The board of shame contains data on 118 companies. The list also includes well-known companies – for example, Norfos mažmena. It is indicated that Norfos mažmena violated the occupational safety rules for workers. The owner of the company Dainius Dundulis believes that in such a list, companies should be divided into groups according to the violations committed – after all, the more employees in the company, the higher the risk of violation. According to Rekvizitai.lt, his company currently employs 3,466 people. "As for occupational safety, we hire a large company that monitors this. I am not saying that we have not had any violations, but I have never seen a person who has not made some kind of mistake. We are formed the opinion that our society should be infallible. I have encountered state inspectorates in the West, where they come to the rescue if a company encounters problems. And not like here, where they use the principle of the whip and public hanging," Dundulis said. In response to the remark that the State Labor Inspectorate uses a practice that already exists in the EU, Dundulis noted that there are different countries in the EU, and, for example, in Germany and the Netherlands, state institutions come to the rescue. The list also includes Lidl Lietuva, where it is stated that the company made a mistake in calculating salaries and violated the procedure for paying them. The company's press secretary, Lina Skersyte, said that she evaluates the State Labor Inspectorate initiative positively. The list of large companies in the list of shame also includes the Klaipeda logistics company Vlantana, which has 2,138 employees. The company has not yet responded to Delfi's questions. The list also includes smaller companies. One of them is the Vilnius cleaning company Tavo švara. The reason is illegal labor, but the head of the company, Lina Nadzeikienė, said that they are only partially to blame. "We missed the moment when the employee's identity card expired, which led to the interpretation that the person was working illegally. But the Migration Department is also to blame, we are talking about a foreign employee. The department delayed the process, the woman won the case in court," Nadzeikienė told Delfi. According to her, we are talking about a Belarusian woman who has lived in Lithuania for 25 years. "The state did not suffer because of this, we paid taxes. But as a director, I received a fine, so we ended up on the list," said the interviewee, noting that they were prohibited from hiring foreigners. "Our employees from Ukraine are suffering now. They cannot renew their permits and work, because we cannot hire them. And if they do not want to go to another employer? What then? The fact that a future client will see us on this list is nonsense, we will endure for three years, but I feel sorry for people who want to work, pay taxes, and as a result will suffer," said Nadzeikienė. Kaunas company Papūgų baras also ended up on the list due to illegal workers. Its director Dalia Kvalitaitė told Delfi that there was a misunderstanding. "We worked for 20 years, there were no violations. There was just a day when a person came to try to work, we did not have time to draw up the documents, and that was it. It was considered a terrible violation," she said. "Of course, this does not do credit," she assessed the fact that the company ended up on the board of shame. The head of the company Dvylika ratų from the Vilnius district, Dominykas Kralikevičius, told Delfi that his company ended up on the list because "it did not transfer several dozen euros to an employee on time." "I know what you are talking about – they recently conducted a routine inspection, they found some minor thing. Perhaps proportionality is needed here. It damages the image when they put you in the same category as serious violators for such a minor thing," he believes.
