The crisis has seriously affected Serbian companies financially. This was confirmed by more than half of domestic companies (54 percent) in the latest research of the Union of Employers of Serbia and the International Labor Organization. As it was estimated, small companies have the most problems, especially those with up to 10 employees.
Many of them have already reduced their salaries, usually in the range of 10 to 20 percent, and there were also businessmen who had to go for a more drastic cut – up to 30 percent. Many fired people at the same time, and according to official data, about 15,000 workers lost their jobs in the period from March to mid-June. There are still layoffs, most often for temporary employees, and a new wave of salary reductions is expected from July.
The latest official data show that salaries are already lower. Although salaries in the public sector have not been reduced, the average April salary is lower than the March salary by about 750 dinars, and that is the price of consequences for the private sector and the introduction of emergency measures that practically froze the entire economy. The average salary in April was 500 euros, and in March 505 euros.
“Those who had to lay off have already done so. Now the key is to keep skilled workers, because the crisis must stop, and in a situation where you have lower incomes, salary cuts could be ahead of new layoffs,” one businessman tells us.
Greater reduction of salaries and mass layoffs were undoubtedly prevented by state measures, ie payment of minimum wages. The state will pay the last 250 euros per worker on July 7, and that is the key moment when a large number of companies will have much less money for salaries.
The question now is whether the companies for which the state minimum wage was part of the salary will be able to pay the entire salary in the future. An even bigger dilemma is what will happen to the workers whose state aid was their full salary, and there were most of them in sectors such as trade, catering, agriculture, production.
The auto industry is also under serious attack. The management of Kragujevac’s “Fiat Chrysler” had to take unpopular measures on several occasions – due to the lack of work in the beginning of June, it decided to extend the forced vacations for nearly 2,400 employees in that company until June 12.
Businessmen were happy when the Government of Serbia announced that it would help the economy and citizens with 5.1 billion euros because they thought it was “a lot of money”. And the help was good and generous, but today, when the measures expire, it sounds much different. “Now it turns out that, apart from the help in three minimum salaries, the rest of the support in two billion euros is a guarantee for loans, and they cannot be obtained on easy terms,” said Nebojsa Atanackovic, president of the Union of Employers.
According to him, banks are asking for almost the same conditions as for loans without a guarantee, because the state guarantees 80 percent of the amount of obtained funds, and the rest is the bank’s risk.
The president of the Association of Free and Independent Trade Unions of Serbia (ASNS), Ranka Savic, says that it is not easy for workers or employers.
“About 200 to 300 workers a day lose their jobs in Serbia. Most of them are workers who had fixed-term contracts. The question is what will happen when the payment of the minimum wage for more than a million workers is completed,” Savic told Blic.
He estimates that this crisis will be incomparably bigger than expected in March.
“Serbia is not an isolated island, so it should be good here now, and the whole of Europe should be in the red. We largely depend on the EU, and their crisis in production is also ours, which means lower salaries and more dismissals,” says Savic, Blic reports.
