Serbia currently has 1,770,000 employed citizens, but the figure is dropping continually, while the unemployment rate has reached 26.2 percent.
This is according to the assistant minister of labor and social policy. Radmila Bukumirić-Katić.
Speaking during a round-table discussion entitled “Dignified Work in Serbia”, organized by the Center for Democracy and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Bukumirić-Katić stressed that 44 percent of the total number of unemployed registered at the national employment agency were young people.
At the same time, a third had only secondary school education, while that there were more women among the unemployed than men.
The average net salary in Serbia in August was RSD 42,120 (some EUR 370), but that points to a serious problem, that people in Serbia are mostly employed in the government sector, because that is the average salary for that sector.
“The most underdeveloped municipalities no longer have the lowest average salary because there are no jobs in the economy and most positions are related to public services in local governments, the police, education and health-care,” she emphasized.
Bukumirić-Katić said 323,000 people worked in the gray economy, but that their number was going down, because slow business made employers lay those workers off first.
“The labour inspection did 15,670 inspections in the first six months of 2012 and found more than 3,000 unregistered employees. We do not know if the number remained the same a month or two later because we have few inspectors, only 250 for the entire Serbia,” Bukumirić-Katić remarked.
Source B92
