ASNS: Workers Avoiding Sick Leaves Even When Seriously Ill for Years Now, Poorly Argued Generalization an Attack on Their Social Position

The Association of Free and Independent Trade Unions (ASNS) has reacted to the announced amendments to the Law on Health Insurance, saying that “the statement of the minister of health, Danica Grujic, that, with the amendments to the Law on Health Insurance, employees will have to stand before the commission after 15 days of a sick leave is peak hypocrisy, a grave accusation, unsupported by any argument, that workers are fake patients and that working doctors are frauds, and an insult to all workers, their colleagues, medical doctors, as well as all the citizens who pay 10.3% of their salary for health insurance each month.”

As they said in their statement, “it’s not the workers who send themselves on sick leaves, but medical doctors, who have the professional competence, professional and personal responsibility, primarily to their patients, and the distrust about the honesty and the professional approach of this profession, expressed publicly this way, requires either an apology or a thorough change of the primary health protection system.”

– The incapability of the minister to solve at least one of the fundamental problems of the healthcare system, beginning with waiting to be operated on for over a year, specialist checks for which people wait for a minimum of six months, the lack of medicines and all the other problems which have unfortunately become an integral part of our healthcare system, the Government and the minister are once again distorting the reality and attacking the workers, all to the end of satisfying the greed of foreign corporations for the already criminal profits they make and take out of the country – ASNS adds.

They also emphasize that “for year now, the workers have been avoiding taking sick leaves even when they are seriously ill, because they lose not just 35% of their salaries, but also the right to serious bonuses for being present at the workplace.”

– That is why each poorly argued generalization, especially if data taken out of context are used, of which the most important argument, according to the minister, is: “the request and the complaints of the economy” is an additional attack on the health and the social position of the workers and their families, and to the benefit of corporations and the already excessively wealthy state and its funds – the statement says.

They add that, according to Eurostat’s data, the workers in Serbia worked an average of 42.3 hours in 2022, which is 2.3 hours longer than the weekly maximum proscribed by the law and six hours more than the workers in the EU states worked (36.2).

Asocijacija slobodnih i nezavisnih sindikata Beograd

Ministarstvo zdravlja Republike Srbije

Association of Free and Independent Trade Unions

ASNS

Ministry of Health

Eurostat

Danica Grujicic

amendments to the Law on Health Insurance

Law on Health Insurance

number of working hours for workers in Serbia