In two days, two accidents in Serbian factories. In the explosion in Trial, one person lost his life and four were injured. At the Magna factory in Aleksinac, glue evaporated, poisoning more than 100 workers.
Dozens of workers die in Serbia every year - in dedicated industry, other factories, on construction sites. According to the data for the year 2022, that is 2,39 injured workers per hundred thousand employees - almost twice as much as the EU average of 1,3 percent.
Who is to blame?
All this raises the question of who is responsible. Some will say that it is always the employer, while others point out that it is the state, and others that it simply "happens".
According to the index of respect for the collective rights of workers, Serbia, together with Romania, North Macedonia and Hungary, is in the penultimate category, where mainly African and Asian countries are classified, Jovan Protić, coordinator of the International Labor Organization, told the website of the United Branch Trade Unions "Nezavisnost". MOR) for Serbia.
As he explained, when it comes to respecting the collective rights of workers, all countries fall into five groups. The first two categories include countries where labor rights are generally respected, and the third category includes countries where workers' rights are often violated.
The fourth category, where Serbia is, is a set of countries in which there is a systematic violation of workers' rights, both by private employers and in the public sector.
In the fifth category, there are countries where workers' rights are not actually realized, although some of them have been formally proclaimed.
"The situation in the field of labor rights in Serbia is generally bad. One of the reasons for this is the slowness in passing new laws and the inconsistency in the implementation of existing laws, in which both the state and the unions have their role and responsibility," said Protić.
Incompetent state
The United Trade Unions of Serbia "Sloga" announced that more and more tragedies at the workplace across the country show that the state, despite the Law on Occupational Safety and Health, is not capable of institutionally implementing measures to protect workers, control and sanction employers and responsible persons in companies and firms where tragedies happen.
That is why "Sloga" called for the urgent strengthening of the legislation and its rigorous application, without exception.
In the "Sloga" trade union, they believe that "the state has stepped deeply into corruption, where institutions do not do their job and where certain employers are tacitly or corruptly allowed to "treat workers as objects, not human beings".
No one is to blame
Commenting on the already mentioned data on how many more workers have died in Serbia compared to the EU, Mario Reljanović, research associate at the Institute for Comparative Law in Belgrade, rated it as "catastrophic".
In the monograph "Criminal offenses in the field of work", of which Reljanović is a co-author, it is stated that in only three percent of cases where a worker is killed, someone ends up in prison, and as a rule, for a maximum of one year. The responsible person at the employer is punished in four percent of cases with house arrest, and in seven percent with probation.
In 86 percent of cases, therefore, no one is allegedly guilty.
"Obviously, much more attention should be paid to the criminal responsibility of the responsible persons at the employer, because that would obviously be the way to take better security measures," Reljanović told "time".
Although in the media, when an accident occurs in a factory, it is speculated whether the workers are to blame, Reljanović says that it is always the responsibility of the employer.
