The number of employees in Serbia increased by 44,422 compared to the same period last year, but the 2.3% increase in employment can be mainly attributed to seasonal workers being included in the count.
Employment growth is recorded in the manufacturing industry, construction, wholesale and retail trade and vehicle repair, writes Politika daily.
Dragoljub Rajić from the Business Support Network (Mreža za Poslovnu Podršku) believes that the state will not be able to maintain the current employment rate once the state aid in the formal sector expires which will cause a decrease in employment, particularly in the production segment.
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“As soon as the aid ends, the reality will set in. A major decline in real employment will occur in the first months of 2021, which are traditionally bad for sale of products and services,” Rajić warns.
“The increase in employment in the third quarter was due to seasonal summer jobs in catering and tourism, which only briefly improved the employment figures. “However, the reality is completely different, because most hotels in Belgrade have announced their closure due to excessive maintenance costs and about 5,000 jobs have already been lost,” Rajić adds.
“This year, the automotive industry is also experiencing a reduction in employment,” he says.
Ranka Savić, president of the Association of Independent Trade Unions, says that in the current situation it is economically impossible to talk about growing employment, especially when we know that hundreds of thousands of people have lost their fixed income.
“Employees in tourism, catering, air transport and road transport have been laid off. The entertainment industry has come to a complete standstill and 26,000 people have lost their income. All this leads to the conclusion that the figures regarding the employment growth are unrealistic,” concludes Savic.
(021.rs, 04.11.2020)
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