The Radio Television of Montenegro (RTCG) Employees' Union announced tonight that RTCG Director Boris Raonić has resigned from her position as an award-winning RTCG correspondent, Nevenka Macan, a few months before her retirement.
"Our colleague Nevenka Macan, a long-time RTCG correspondent from Herceg Novi, was fired yesterday. Instead of sending the journalist, who is the winner of our company's annual award for contribution to the quality of the program, into retirement, RTCG management is terminating her employment contract," the RTCG Employees' Union said in a statement.
"It's important for me to send a message that if this happened to me, who received an award for my work at the Television of Montenegro, I was the journalist of the year... so it could happen to anyone. People, wake up," said Macan after she was served with a notice of termination of her employment contract by registered mail, the statement reads.
The RTCG Employees' Union said that they could say that they were surprised, shocked, and taken aback by this action by the RTCG management.
"But the truth is that we are not. This is a scenario that is being prepared for dissenters. Many members of our union are being 'packaged' with dismissals these days. The reason - we have our own position, we think for ourselves, we speak out publicly and question various controversial decisions of the general director. Our members are being mobbed, exposed to daily pressure, open and covert threats, messages that they will be assigned to other jobs. Criminal paths these days lead from television to portals and radio. Or to - dismissal," the statement reads.
The RTCG Employees' Union added that Macan said that she "opposed the completely illogical and unproductive way of organizing work by transferring four employees from Herceg Novi who have worked in this office for twenty-one years to work in Tivat," and said that Macan wrote to the members of the Council and the Director General of RTCG on this occasion.
On April 17, Vijesti announced that four employees of the RTCG correspondent in Herceg Novi had been assigned to a new job in Tivat since the end of March this year, and that journalist Nevenka Macan claimed that she could not accept and support this decision by the public service's management.
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"We protest most strongly against this inhumane act of management, which has long been seriously compromised. Although we are being attributed with an ineptly twisted spin that we are politically biased, we emphasize that this is a forcibly applied label that is intended to cover up the truth. The truth is that we are professionals who raised our voices fighting for the minimum dignity of our professions in negotiations for a new Collective Agreement, and this in one of the most repressive moments in the history of RTCG. We call on all workers who have been mobbed these days, who have been threatened (softly or aggressively) or who have been blackmailed in any way to report their case to our Union and the competent institutions. We also warn that the ease with which the current management hands out layoffs at RTCG has its price. When employees leave in the way that our colleague Macan is leaving, then the reputation of the public service collapses," the statement of the RTCG Employees' Union reads.
They also state that management forgets that journalists who have been doing public work for decades have a long-established reputation in the local and wider community they serve, and that their work is visible and eternal in the RTCG archives.
"The only thing that is not visible is the work of management, whose numerous controversial decisions the public has no insight into. Therefore, at the end of this text we ask the question. Who decided to spend almost half a million euros a year on the work of external collaborators? Why do we need this engagement? How many people are engaged in this way? And why do we so easily and quickly give up on employees who even reached retirement working for the minimum wage," said the RTCG Employees' Union.
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