ASNS Demands Minimum Wage of at Least RSD 50,000 Net Amount Immediately

The Association of Free and Independent Trade Unions (ASNS) announced yesterday that it requested for the minimum wage in Serbia to be at least RSD 50,000 net amount and to be implemented without delay, for the payment of September salaries, warning that, otherwise, the burden of the crisis would be put on the workers again, and the poorest ones at that.

– A minimum wage of RSD 50,000 would enable a median salary of around RSD 80,000, which would, above all, during the announced critical winter, secure at least a minimum of social security for over 50% employees and their families – the press release said.

They warn that the projected consumer basket is coming close to an amount of RSD 100,000 and that there is practically no product or service whose price has not gone drastically up.

– All the citing of statistics and percentages is insignificant considering the basic fact that, with RSD 40,000, a family can survive, with rigorous saving, for half a month at most – the unions said.

ASNS therefore once again invites the Government of Serbia the representative unions to “get serious in these difficult and unpredictable times and to secure at least the minimum, elementary social security for the majority of workers and citizens of Serbia through the minimum wage”.

The association also estimated that confirming a new minimum wage went nearly unnoticed, as if the lives of at least four million citizens of Serbia practically didn’t depend on the new amount, and that the negotiations “this time as well have been reduced to pure formality, so, on September 1, a minimum wage of RSD 40,000 net amount will be set, as the president announced”.

ASNS asks what the new minimum wage means to workers when the prices of vegetables have increased 30%, when meat is 17% more expensive, milk 18%, “and they’re just waiting for the price limits to be lifted to continue going wild, when to heat an apartment of 60 square meters for the next winter requires at least RSD 100,000 if exclusively cheap electricity is used for heating, RSD 140,000 for fuel oil, not to mention the prices of pellet and coal, since they can’t be bought anyway”.

– In the conditions of our entirely non-functional social system, nearly half the citizens of Serbia will live in poverty – ASNS believes.

Vlada Republike Srbije

Asocijacija slobodnih i nezavisnih sindikata Beograd

Aleksandar Vučić

ASNS

minimum wage

consumer basket

consumer basket price