The Nezavisnost trade union reported that employees of the Korean factory Yura in Rača were ordered by their management to return to the factory and resume regular three-shift work, even though they had been sent home yesterday morning.
Production was supposed to start again on Monday after the paid leave which lasted since March 26 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the president of the Nezavisnost trade union, Sasa Markovic, the workers gathered in front of the factory on Monday morning and refused to work, so the employer sent them home afterwards.
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During the same morning, however, the plant’s HR department reported to the Beta news agency that Yura would not start its operations until the end of the week, but that it would still consider working in a minimum of work regime, with fewer employees and complying with the prescribed physical distance between workers.
“Production is organized in such a way that there are 40 workers in a 25.30-metre-long chain and the next chain is about one metre away,” said Markovic, who felt these measures were not appropriate for the pandemic.
One of the employees said that the workers are afraid of the infection and that there are married couples among them who also fear for their health.
The trade union confirmed that it would meet with representatives of the city’s crisis headquarters and the factory’s management, and that it would insist that compliance with everything that had been agreed on the organization of work during the state of emergency be put in writing.
Head of the crisis unit, Nenad Savkovic, said that he was unaware of the reasons for the factory’s backtracking, since he himself had been informed that the factory would not work all week.
Savkovic informed that the crisis headquarters of the Serbian government and the Serbian Chamber of Commerce about what happened.
“There are people from 10 different municipalities working here in Rača who come here with organized transport. It is not wise to mix workers from different municipalities where there are also registered cases of coronavirus,” he concluded.
(Danas, 07.04.2020)
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