Union of Civil Servants of Sarajevo Canton Announces Civil Disobedience

(Patria) - The Independent Union of Civil Servants and Employees of Sarajevo Canton (KS) has issued a warning to the authorities, expressing dissatisfaction with the neglect of civil servants and employees in that canton, and announced civil disobedience if the Government of KS does not urgently change its course and sit down at the negotiating table with representatives of the Union, and if the postponement of vacation pay continues.

The Union demands urgent reform and amendments to the Law on Salaries and the Law on Civil Service, which they consider outdated and have become "a noose around the neck" of the civil service, an end to verbal promises, legally binding guarantees and deadlines, and payment of vacation pay within the legal deadline.

Furthermore, they demand the continuation of talks that began through negotiations on the Collective Agreement, as agreed, and to set timeframes as a basis for further union action in organizing warnings and strikes.

They remind that behind every capital investment and project stands the dedicated work of civil servants, that behind every court verdict stands an entire invisible chain of court administration, that behind every expert finding and opinion stand engineers from institutes, that behind every extinguished fire stand our brave firefighters.

All of them are civil servants and employees who daily, professionally and responsibly, serve the needs of citizens and maintain the functionality of the Canton through 29 institutions.

For three years, the Union has been warning that the status of this category of workers is drastically deteriorating and that salary increases over the past two years have not even come close to mitigating the impacts of galloping inflation.

"Due to the absence of a systemic approach and minimally set base salaries, we have reached an absurd and shameful situation where the four lowest coefficients have disappeared from the civil service. By increasing the minimum wage (without adjusting the coefficients), the salaries of unskilled workers have equaled the salaries of workers with secondary education. As many as 600 employees are currently receiving supplements to the guaranteed wage. This is not social policy; it is the destruction of the dignity of work," the Union stated.