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10,000 people lost their jobs in Serbia in May

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In May, according to the records of the National Employment Service, more than 10,000 people applied to the bureau, which is an exceptional growth since the number of applicants increased by about 2,500 in the previous two months, Danas writes.
At the end of May, there were 522,987 registered jobseekers through the NES. In June, the number of newly registered increased by about 3,000, writes Danas.
In total, since March 16, when the state of emergency was introduced until the end of June, the number of people looking for a job through the NES has increased by about 10,800, according to the data of this institution.
However, it remains to be seen what will happen when the state aid measures expire, since the last state minimum is paid in July, and three months after that, employers are not allowed to lay off more than 10% of employees, otherwise they return the money.
Yesterday’s statement by the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, that there will be no new package of measures to support the private sector due to the consequences of the corona crisis, does not help either. However, the unemployment rate is not the best measure of the effects of the corona crisis on workers.
Namely, the International Labor Organization estimated at the global level that in the first quarter, the equivalent of 155 million full-time jobs were lost.
In the second quarter, that almost tripled and as many as 480 million jobs were lost (if a 40-hour work week is counted).
Jovan Protic from the International Labor Organization explains that there are four types of how the crisis affected employment.
“First of all, there is the growth of the unemployment rate, then the growth of the inactivity rate. The third way is to increase the number of part-time jobs and in the end there are workers who formally remain employed but do not work. So, the unemployment rate alone is not a good indicator of the total damage to society,” notes Protic, adding that the research according to this methodology for Serbia will be completed soon.
In northern Macedonia, for example, the number of working hours decreased by 85,500 full-time jobs in the second quarter.
He also points out that it is still difficult to assess the impact on employment because not much time has passed, but measures that amortize the effects of the crisis on employment are still valid.
“The real situation will be seen from October,” he said, recalling the ILO’s main recommendation, which is that after the crisis, countries do not rush with fiscal consolidations before the employment recovery begins.
Mihail Arandarenko, a professor at the Faculty of Economics, points out that the ban on hiring more than 10 percent of workers if the state’s help is taken is not as intensive the protection of workers as it is presented.
“Companies could have fired up to 10 percent of workers without returning the money, and yet they did not use that space, and that is encouraging. That measure was generous to companies. For now, things are not so bad. We had a drop in employment in the first quarter according to the Labor Force Survey, but not much can be deduced from that. The survey covered only two weeks of the epidemic in March and did not capture the full effect of the crisis. The data from the Employment Bureau are not bad either, some tens of thousands are more registered. Part of the reason for that is the structure of employment, where we have a lot of employees in the public sector, and among others we have a lot of self-employed people,” Arandarenko estimates, noting that there is so much uncertainty that no forecasts can be given.
“It all depends on the corona. In my opinion, the very negative thing is that we did not manage to cope with this wave of epidemics. Even if we had a constant decline in turnover in the hospitality and trade sector, if we had isolated the crisis in one sector, it would have been easier to help them in the long run. This way, when the measures are constantly rising and falling, then you have to help the whole economy.
“But the situation is such that even epidemiologists could not imagine a summer with so many cases,” he points out.
According to him, as in the previous crisis, the most endangered are those who are employed on a work contract or on occasional and temporary jobs.
“They are not undeclared workers, but when things go well, companies hire them, but when the work stops, they no longer exist. They are endangered, and in the last crisis we had a very big drop in employment, but it was mostly a category of these vulnerable jobs and it will probably look like that even now. On the one hand, we have completely protected good jobs and that is everyone who works in the public sector on good contracts, financial institutions and foreign companies. And the more the sector is inhabited by small companies and service-oriented, especially high-contact jobs are in the biggest crisis,” notes Arandarenko, Nova reports.

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