More than 10 workers – 11 to be precise – have lost their jobs at the German company Trendtex, which operates a production facility in Bela Palanka, representing one third of the total workforce.
Some of them spoke to Nova.rs about the working conditions at the factory, which dismissed them without paying their final wages and which, according to announcements by the President of Serbia, had been presented as “a chance for the revival of Bela Palanka”.
“Shameful” and “heartless” are the words used by workers of Trendtex in Bela Palanka, who lost their jobs last week. According to some of them, the factory that the authorities, led by Aleksandar Vučić, had promoted as an opportunity for the revival of Bela Palanka, has now left 11 employees unemployed.
“I worked at the factory for just under three years. When I first started, everything seemed fine. However, suspicions arose when rumours began circulating – and later turned out to be true – that the company had gone bankrupt and its bank account had been frozen, after which the management suddenly renamed the company. It was first called Trentex, and later Trentex Inc. So they changed the company name because of all those debts and blocked accounts,” one of the workers told Nova.rs (her identity is known to Nova’s reporters).
According to her, the situation worsened further last year, when workers’ wages were delayed by three months and they simultaneously received notice of a collective holiday leave.
“Last year, at one point, we thought the facility was shutting down because we received a notice about collective leave, which, as we later found out, was allegedly false, because after being absent from work for two days, we received warnings ahead of dismissal. Because of this, a complaint was filed with the Labour Inspectorate, and some of us also initiated lawsuits.”
She explained that the management then began pressuring them to withdraw the lawsuits. “They started forcing us to withdraw the lawsuits, saying that wages were delayed because of us and those lawsuits, even though the lawsuits hadn’t even resulted in any payments – absolutely nothing,” she adds
Impossible targets for most workers
Asked about wages, she described them as “shameful”, while production targets were “unattainable for most”. “Ninety per cent of us cannot reach the target. Older workers may manage to get to 90, 95 or even 100 per cent. About a month and a half ago, they informed around ten of us that we had to achieve at least 80 per cent of the target. Otherwise, we would be dismissed, which is exactly what happened on Friday,” she said and added that even workers who somehow managed to meet the target did not earn even the minimum wage.
“Last month I received 49,000 dinars – that was the last wage I got. And all of us have loans. We’re in a very difficult situation. They promised that the factory would lift up Bela Palanka, but the opposite happened – we’re all drowning in debt,” she said and added that the factory would most likely close down soon.
“That’s certainly how it looks to me. There are only around fifteen workers left there now. That’s nothing. They can’t possibly carry the entire workload,” she noted.
As Južne Vesti reported in November last year, the company’s bank account had already been frozen under enforced collection proceedings for 490 days at that point – since 2 July – over debts exceeding 22.2 million dinars.
The factory, which produces work uniforms, opened in 2018 and was initially announced as a project that would employ 250 workers. However, the number of employees never exceeded 100.
The authorities had promoted the factory as a chance for the revival of Bela Palanka. Long-serving Bela Palanka municipal president Goran Miljković used the factory’s opening as an opportunity to switch, together with the entire municipal leadership and the local Democratic Party committee, to the Serbian Progressive Party, transforming himself from a “great democrat” into an even greater supporter of the ruling party.
No sign of officials
The Freedom and Justice Party (SSP) had already pointed out last year that all 50 remaining workers would lose their jobs, and that the factory owed employees up to three unpaid wages.
The factory’s website has since been shut down, while the employees’ email domain has also been deactivated. The contact telephone number previously listed on the website belongs to a worker who has not been employed there for years.
“It is true that the number of workers never exceeded 100 and that the factory received enormous subsidies – both directly from the state in cash and from the municipality through the adaptation of the facility – which cost the impoverished municipality of Bela Palanka more than 100 million dinars. Now that the factory is closing and people are being thrown out onto the street, there is no sign whatsoever of Vučić, Glišić or Miljković. Will Miljković now demonstratively leave the SNS and morally resign from the position of municipal president because the ‘largest investment in the history of Bela Palanka’ has collapsed?” asked SSP MP Jelena Milošević, who also revealed the information about the workers’ dismissals.
The editorial staff of Nova.rs sent questions to the factory’s email address regarding the dismissal of workers, but no response had been received by the time this article was published.
(Nova, 11.05.2026)