May 30, 2018 - In the report done by this institution which handles statistics at EU level and candidate countries, it is stated that contracts with fixed terms in our country, at the end of 2017, saw 30.5 percent of employees in the state. This is twice as high than the European average, which is 14.3 percent. According to the Institute for Statistics of Montenegro, at the end of last year in Montenegro were 182,368 employees, meaning that 55,622 workers were engaged for a fixed term period.
In EU, fixed time contracts see 27 million people aged 15 to 64. In the past year in the EU, more women were engaged for a fixed term (14.8 percent), than men (13.8 percent). In Montenegro, there are more men working on specific time limit.
The largest share of employees with temporary contracts at EU level is in Spain and Poland, and the lowest in Romania and Lithuania. Thus, in Spain and Poland, each fourth employee works on fixed terms, and one out of five in Portugal, the Netherlands and Croatia.
Less than two percent of those with fixed-term contracts are in Romania (1.2%) and Lithuania (1.7%). Also, a low percentage is in Latvia (3.0%), Estonia (3.1%), Bulgaria (4.4%), Malta and the United Kingdom (5.6%)
Trade Union Federation Secretary (SSCG) Duško Zarubica states that so far, we abused the Labor Act which allowed engaging employees in fixed-term contracts. He believes that this will be corrected by a new act that should be adopted by the end of the year, which states that the employment relationship is based on an indefinite period, and contracts of a few months are possible only in exceptional circumstances. He states that the new labor law provides that fixed term contracts can be concluded up to three years, but that the situation has improved.
"So far, some employers have engaged people throughout agencies so they would not sign contracts with them permanently. Now this situation is changing, and if one employee has been working for three years at the same employer, he gets a permanent contract, and I think that we are preventing abuses," said Zarubica. His colleague from the Union of Free Trade Unions, Sandra Obradovic, states that the practice of concluding a fixed term contract has created an army of workers who are in constant fear of being dismissed. She says that, unfortunately, the situation in Montenegro is such that employers prefer to make contracts on a definite instead of an indefinite period, and that with this they do not receive anything at all, but their workers are at a loss.
Text by Dan, on May 30th, 2018, read more at CdM
