Ministry of Finance, headed by the Minister Novica Vuković, without the knowledge of the working group that prepares the new law on wages in the public sector, made amendments to this law, which planned to increase the wages of all officials by 30 percent.
This was officially confirmed to "Vijesti" by the president of the Education Union Radomir Božović and the president of the State Administration and Judiciary Union Nenad Rakočević.
Amendments to the law on wages in the public sector, which propose to increase the wages of all public officials, have been on public debate since the day before yesterday until December 8.
"As a member of the Working Group in front of the Union, I am taken aback by this decision. In June, I attended the Working Group session for the last time, and since then I have not received an invitation to the meeting, and I am not aware that there have been any activities on this issue. I heard unofficially that there was a meeting last Friday, and we did not find an invitation for that meeting in the files we have in the Union. The Union was taken aback when this draft was published the day before yesterday, and we will soon take a position on this issue," said Božović.
Božović said that this way of working deviates from what they agreed upon when they started working, and that there was a story that the coefficients at the state level would be balanced, that there would be no deviations at the state level, that certain structures in healthcare had a higher coefficient than those structure in education and that the coefficients will be balanced.
"In the end, we received that only the salaries of officials were increased by 30 percent. Let me emphasize that I am not against anyone's salary being increased, but not in a selective way like this. By the way, that gap was noticeable between officials with a seventh degree who are not officials and managers in certain sectors or mayors, without talking about members of the government or deputies. These officials who did not receive any increase in the previous period remain with a coefficient of 9,6, and their managers will have coefficients of 15, then up to 20 or 25. This creates a big gap, not to mention the coefficients of the president of the state, the government, which are over 30 to 35, MPs are now at around 29. We in education have managed to slightly increase our coefficients, so a professor with a seventh degree has 10,42, and if you compare him with a MP for whom 29 is proposed, it turns out that the MP has three times the starting coefficient not counting other parliamentary allowances", said Božović.
According to him, this way creates too big a gap in the public sector, and the Government has failed to balance and unify the differences in salaries.
"We have a working group purely for the sake of the public, and in the end, decisions are made beyond the knowledge of individual members of the working group and its members. No one called the Union of Free Trade Unions to make coefficients and negotiate," said Božović.
Rakočević said that they had a meeting last Friday where the Ministry of Finance presented amendments to the law on wages in the public sector and that they were taken aback because the Working Group is preparing a new law, not amendments.
"This public hearing is another law," Rakočević stressed.
He said that the intention of the Government is to exclude the coefficients for the calculation of salaries of employees in the public sector from collective agreements and to define salaries in the public sector by means of decrees.
"We will not agree to that. The basis for salary calculation is branch collective agreements and nothing can be changed without the consent of the union when it comes to salaries," said Rakočević.
The justification for the salary increase is that the department of Finance Minister Novica Vuković justifies that "now in the salary system, certain employees have higher salaries than superior managers"
The intention for higher salaries is also justified by the fact that "in the past few years, through changes in collective agreements, the coefficients of job complexity have been increased for all employees in the public sector, except for public officials and holders of judicial and constitutional court functions".
All public officials received higher salaries recently through the implementation of the "Europe Now 2" program.
Public officials are the presidents of the Government, the Assembly and the state, ministers, deputies, the president and members of the Senate of the State Audit Institution, the protector of human rights and freedoms, the president of the State Commission, the presidents and judges of the Supreme, Appellate, Constitutional, Commercial, higher and basic courts, the supreme state prosecutor, chief special prosecutor, other prosecutors, local officials...
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