The announced strike that the workers of the company "Port of Adria" (POA) were supposed to go on at the beginning of January this year was legal and in accordance with regulations. This was decided by the Basic Court in Bar, which dismissed the lawsuit of the director of POA Sedata Kare about the assessment of the legality of the strike, "Vijesti" learns.
Some workers planned to strike because the company's management had not fulfilled the agreement on salary increases from 2023 and because a collective agreement had not been signed. However, the strike was postponed by a decision of the Basic Court in Bar, pending the completion of the court proceedings on the company director's lawsuit.
As sources among the company's workers told "Vijesti", this is good news for them, but they do not yet have a concrete work plan regarding the strike and it will take time to see whether they will suspend work or not, because several things have changed in the past two months.
PoA Executive Director Sedat Kara filed a lawsuit with the Basic Court in Bar to assess the legality of the strike, stating that the documentation was incomplete. The court accepted the request and then issued a decision banning the strike until the legal proceedings were completed.
As the presidents of two PoA workers' unions told "Vijesti" in January, before the strike, Zoran Martinovic i Ratko Stanisavljević, 145 full-time employees at that company were supposed to go on strike, which is more than half, as the company currently has 280 employees.
In accordance with the court's decision, they said, the strike is being postponed since the appeal does not postpone the execution of this decision.
In the judge's decision Sabine Ličine which "Vijesti" had access to, it says that this is a temporary measure until the procedure is completed, and as a basis for the lawsuit, the executive director of the PoA company stated that, in accordance with the law, the decision to go on strike at the employer is made by the competent body of the representative trade union at the employer, where the competent body is the executive board.
"The employer was not provided with the relevant decisions of the executive boards of both representative unions on the basis of which the strike was initiated, which the strike committee was obliged to do. Furthermore, the strike committee did not provide an updated list of employees on strike within 24 hours after the changes in the list occurred," is part of the technical and legal reasons stated in the judge's decision and related to the lawsuit filed by the PoA management.
In the same document, the words of the defendant unions were conveyed, who told the judge that they submitted all the required documentation from the beginning of the organization of the strike, which was announced for January 9, to the fulfillment of the request.
The documentation shows that the representative unions decided at a joint meeting to launch a strike and form a strike committee that will further manage the organization of the strike. In response to the employer's complaint about the illegality of the strike due to the lack of an individual decision by the executive committees of the representative unions, they noted that according to the Law on Strikes, it is sufficient for a strike to be initiated by one representative union.
According to the Law on Strikes, the strike is managed by the strike committee, which was duly submitted to the employer, as can be seen from the attached documentation. As for updating the list of employees who signed up for the strike, they are informed of the obligation to update it, the decision states, and that every signatory who withdraws from the strike list is obliged to inform the strike committee in person or in writing about it in order to update the list, which is proven through the example provided in the documentation.
"Whether someone left or became eligible for retirement during the negotiations with the employer or the strike organization if they or the employer did not inform them personally, they cannot know, because not all signatories to the strike are union members. They think that this is primarily the obligation of the employer and the employee. They noted that they were informed on January 3 that one worker had retired in the meantime, and that Ratko Stanisavljević - as the president of the union organization - sent an email to his colleague from human resources and went in person to get that information. The information has not been delivered to him to this day, and he submitted the email as an attachment to the documentation. From the documentation submitted, it is clear that their goal is for everything to be done according to the Law," the judge's decision states in the part that refers to the statement of the defendants, that is, the union members.
The company "Port of Adria" AD did not respond to "Vijesti"'s questions regarding the strike, workers' demands, the dynamics of work in that case, as well as whether and when they will fulfill the workers' demands.
The demands of the strike refer to the agreement from 2023, as they said, when a 40 percent salary increase was agreed for all employees in the company. Since then, salaries have been increased by 20 percent and then by around six, and the planned increase of the remaining 15 percent was promised for January of this year.
Stanisavljević and Martinović said earlier that the employer did not fulfill that agreement and that negotiations with the company director were not successful.
Bonus video:
