Prime Minister Đuro Macut and Minister of Culture Nikola Selakovic at the end of last year, they signed the Regulation on coefficients, which determines salaries in the cultural sector.
Culture employees and their unions did not know that such a regulation was being prepared, nor that it had been adopted.
This Regulation on coefficients has been corrected, which was adopted more than a year ago, by increasing the lowest coefficients for non-artistic occupations: tailors, shoemakers and other workers who participate in the creation of, for example, theater plays, but are not artists.
Degradation of workers in culture
Branch "Independence" trade union believes that regardless of this increase, the Regulation "will not contribute to the improvement of the financial position of employees" because "this act completely degraded workers and rendered their competence, knowledge and experience meaningless", the announcement states.
Darko Tomovic, the president of the actors' union "Singlus" at the Belgrade National Theater, explains to "Vreme" that "the increased coefficients are now just below the coefficients of, for example, a choir singer or a ballet dancer 3. Of course, all technical services should have increased coefficients, we advocated for it when the previous version of this Regulation was adopted, but we did not advocate for uranium mining. What has now been voted in the Government is an equalization, not a fair distribution of funds from of the state budget, which everyone in the culture stands for".
The trade union "Nezavisnost" assesses that "by equalizing the salaries of those whose jobs require high and specialist education and those who complete work tasks with a minimum of schooling, the Government shows that it does not understand culture and that it does not care about it".
Bad blood
Darko Tomović emphasizes that no one consulted them when drafting the new version of the Regulation.
"They believe that they are authorized to shape our lives. And their goal is to divide the technical services and artists even more and oppose each other, to sow bad blood. I am sure that not a single actor will say 'why did the shoemaker get an increase and not me'. And that is what no amount of bad blood will be able to overcome," says Darko Tomović.
