Nezavisne novine: SARAJEVO – Civil servants and employees of 61 state institutions, around 22000 of them, will go on strike if the Council of Ministers and the Parliament do not meet their demands for increase in salaries by 25 per cent, announced leaders of union of these workers.
“It is known that there is ongoing procedure of adoption of the Law on Salaries in Institutions of BiH. They asked that our representatives are included its drafting, which was refused, as well as all of our proposals for improvement of this Law. We ask for increase in salaries by 25 per cent and if our demand is not met, we will go on strike. We do not want to strike, but it is more and more probable that that will happen, because the employers do not react at all to our demands”, said Neđo Đurđić, the member of the Coordination Board of the Union of civil servants and employees.
The House of Representatives of the BH Parliament on Thursday evening adopted in first reading the Law on Salaries in the State Institutions.
Deputy President of the Union of the SIPA, Juro Bilić expressed readiness for talks with the representatives of the Council of Ministers and the BiH Parliament so the strike could be avoided.
“If they do not meet our demands, the strike is inevitability. We want to rectify illogicality that, for example, police officers in entities have larger salary than police officers who work for the state security agencies”, stressed Bilić.
Union representatives insist that the Law on Salaries solves the problem of injustice in division of salaries, because the salaries of the highest state officials will be increased by 130 per cent, while for 6000 officers the salaries will be decreased.
“If the strike happens, which we do not want because of the citizens of BiH, some of the institutions will stop working while the others will support the strike. The Law forbids some of the institutions to stop working. However, we can search busses and trucks at the border for up to five hours. That is so called white strike”, said Mehmedalija Osmić, president of the Union of the Indirect Taxation Authority of BiH.