Vulin: Law on Labor helped reduce unemployment

BELGRADE - Serbian Minister of Labor, Veteran and Social Affairs Aleksandar Vulin said Tuesday that the implementation of the new Law on Labor has helped reduce the unemployment rate in Serbia from 20.3 to 17.6 percent.

Some of the amendments to this law, adopted by the Serbian parliament on July 18, met with the opposition of the trade unions, who claimed that the changes infringe on workers' acquired rights.

Now that political passions have cooled down, and the implementation of the Law on Labor can be analyzed objectively, it turned out that the law is better than the public debate indicated, said Vulin.

The adoption of the Law on Labor was supported by employers' associations and investors, as well as foreign officials in their meetings with government representatives, Vulin noted at a conference in Belgrade on the implementation of the labor law.

According to Vulin, no political party today is ready to advocate for the scrapping of the amended Law on Labor.

The latest workforce survey, conducted in the third quarter of 2014, indicates that the unemployment rate in Serbia has dropped from 20.3 to 17.6 percent, he said.

This is good news for Serbia's economy, the labor minister stressed, adding that he personally expected unemployment to decrease to a little under 19 percent.

Vulin noted that the implementation of the Law on Labor is one of the factors that contributed to the unemployment drop.

Among other things, the law changed the role of labor inspection and helped businesses direct their activities from the grey area into legal channels.
"We were concerned that certain provisions of the Law on Labor would lead to a rise in fixed-term employment contracts, but in...