THERE’S WORK FOR THOSE WHO WANT IT: Domestic Workers Won’t Work at Fiat for 70,000 Dinars, So 800 Workers are Coming from Morocco and Nepal!

Eight hundred workers from Nepal and Morocco will be employed at the Fiat factory in Kragujevac because there are none available in Kragujevac, Television Kragujevac reported, citing a statement by City Councilor for Economy Radomir Erić.

For the long-time leader of the Independent Trade Union of Kragujevac and the Zastava Oružje factory, Jugoslav Ristić, the arrival of foreign workers at the car factory is no surprise.

“It’s clear that workers from abroad will come, because for those wages, which are slightly more than 70,000 dinars, people in Kragujevac are obviously not interested, as they cannot survive on that. And that is why they are resorting to bringing in workers from Nepal and Morocco, countries where people are very poor,” Ristić, who is the president of the “Nova svetlost” Association, told the Beta agency.

He stated that in Nepal, which has 27 million inhabitants, more than half of the people have less than $1.25 per day for spending, while Morocco, with 37 million inhabitants, has a GDP more than three times smaller than Serbia.

A Zone of Cheap Labor

The average salary in Serbia, Ristić said, is around 108,000 dinars, and in Kragujevac, it is a few thousand dinars lower than that.

At the Fiat factory in Kragujevac, Ristić explained, a worker can earn around 90,000 dinars if they work every Saturday, but that means working more than 40 hours a week.

Ristić noted that it is a well-known story that Fiat in Kragujevac cannot secure workers and that it has already brought in workers from Italy, but it paid them incomparably more than Serbian workers, around 100 euros per day.

He believes that if Fiat were to pay a worker 1,000 euros a month here, it would easily secure workers if the state, which holds a one-third stake in the company, could regulate it.

“Our politicians long ago proclaimed that the number of our people leaving Serbia to work in the West should be equal to the number of those coming from abroad, and that this process has begun. The message is that Serbia must remain a zone of cheap labor. This is the policy of multinational companies, which our government supports,” Ristić claims.

FICO POŠTUJE SRBIJU: Premijer Slovačke se oglasio o napadu na Slovake u Bačkom Petrovcu od strane batinaša!

Low Wages and Lost Opportunities

The president of the regional committee of metalworkers for central Serbia from the Independent Trade Union, Goran Milić, told the Beta agency that domestic workers who get hired at Fiat stay for a few days and “run away,” most likely due to the low wages.

He added that there are no foreign workers in the Kragujevac car factory yet, but there is a lot of “talk” about hiring them.

It was also mentioned, he said, that 80 Filipinos would come to the “Wacker Neuson” company for welder positions, but that arrangement fell through.

“It was expected that the foreign workers would pay only ten percent tax, which the state did not allow, so they gave up because it’s not profitable for them to pay the full amount. Their salary was supposed to be 500 euros, with two meals and accommodation of 100 euros paid for. In that case, these workers would be cheaper than ours,” Milić said.

He pointed out that it is normal for local welders to go abroad to work for eight euros per hour, while that same work is paid two euros per hour in Serbia.