While in the Eurozone last year there was an increase in hourly labor prices by six percent, in the Republika Srpska, the hourly wage is not defined, because there are no branch collective agreements. The same exists in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but trade unionists say that any single-digit percentage increase would effectively mean nothing, because they are in the Eurozone – and more than six times higher than in our country.
If you tried to calculate the minimum hourly wage in RS, it would look like this: The minimum wage of 673 marks divided by the minimum number of working days amounts to about 30 marks divided into eight hours a day, and it turns out that an hour of work costs a minimum of about 3 marks and 80 pfennigs.
In the FBiH, which, unlike the RS, has branch collective agreements and a defined hourly rate, trade unionists would consider an hourly rate increase of a few percent a misery. The only solution, they say, is to increase the minimum wage.
Selvedin Satorovic, Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Bosnia and Herzegovina: “The lowest hourly wages in branch collective agreements are in the field of textiles and amount to 3.45 BAM, and the highest in the metal industry, where it is 4.40. An increase of six percent, say in the Eurozone, is acceptable because wages there are a few thousand euros, and in six percent of us would represent nothing but misery”.
Drazen Pejakovic, Citizens’ Association “Labor Movement”: “People work an abnormal number of hours, the norms are terrible and they work exclusively for the minimum wage. Those women and the people who work, are more in a slave-owning environment.”
Miserable salaries can hardly cover the cost of living, and if we believe the pessimistic forecasts of economists, caused by the latest global banking crisis, we are once again expecting an increase in food prices. Some experts believe that the law of the market will still play a role here.
Professor at the Faculty of Economics in Sarajevo, Aziz Sunje, says: “You cannot expect that every increase will have a reflection with corresponding demand. It is these market mechanisms that will affect price controls to some extent.”
The fact that the consumer basket in BiH for the last month amounted to 2,900 marks is also alarming. The minimum wage in both entities covers only a little more than a fifth of this amount.
