Experts, as well as the World Bank and IMF, see the number of employees as one of the bigger problems in the Electric Power Industry of Serbia. According to the conclusion of the Fiscal Council of Serbia, EPS employs 10 percent more workers than necessary. In addition, experts believe that it is necessary to build additional capacity, which requires great savings.
Electric Power Industry of Serbia currently employs over 25,000 people. The Fiscal Council estimates that about two and a half thousand are surplus.
“According to our calculations, EPS is 10 percent more occupied. It is also estimated that the average salary in 2020 will be around 100 thousand dinars”, said Pavle Petrovic of the Fiscal Council.
Those salaries are paid to those who are in excess, claims journalist of Danas Aleksandar Milosevic.
On one hand, EPS has redundancies, and on the other, they lack skilled labor.
“When you see this, you realize that they have a very large number of people that they don’t need, who were employed bz some party channels and receive large salaries in EPS. On the other hand, they lack workers who would maintain this system”, Milosevic said.
Milosevic says, in the long run, EPS will have to save money to build additional capacity, and one way to save is to lay off a number of people. For now, he says, they have enough funding from citizens and the state, which is not pressuring them.
“They are now sitting and thinking about the easy position they are in, not thinking about what tomorrow will be”, Milosevic said.
Trade union activist Dragoslav Ljubicic believes that the company lacks qualified personnel. Claiming to be the biggest problem in EPS business in the last 10-15 years is a vague strategy of where to go with the reorganization.
“That company, precisely at the behest of the World Bank and the IMF, workers are losing their subjectivity in terms of business, because the goal, I guess, was to create a single company. And now both your healthy and sick parts of EPS are together and the biggest problem that now there is mismanagement of the company”, Ljubicic said.
N1 tried to get EPS to answer the questions when it was planned to reorganize the business and who the redundancies were, but there was no answer.
According to a report from the Fiscal Council, the problems that EPS has yet to address are related to new investments, environmental protection, and higher prices for households. Electricity for Serbian citizens has increased by 3.9 percent since December, reports N1.
