Fiat Plastic attempted to break a strike by its workers in the Serbian city of Kragujevac by placing the strike committee on paid leave in May 2021 and transferring some of the production away from the Kragujevac facility. Protests began on 12 January with one-hour-per-day stoppages further to the announcement of a €300 annual pay cut.
In June, management were charged with misdemeanours by the Labour Inspectorate over attempts to break the strike. Thirteen workers who took part in the stoppages, including the entire strike committee, were illegally placed on leave, and the committee locked out of the plant. Management also removed machinery from the plant.
In August, the United Trade Unions of Serbia denounced intimidation by the Security and Information Agency of Serbia (BIA). BIA called the president of the strike committee on 11 August to invite him to a “conversation”. The Fiat Plastic union refused, announcing that it was “not interested in politics”, only with trade union matters.
The dispute continued. Negotiations with Fiat, mediated by the state Agency for the Peaceful Settlement of Labor Disputes, failed in October.
The president of the strike committee, Zoran Miljković, speaking to the press on 17 November, reported that the line minister Darija Kisić Tepavčević betrayed her promises, as well as the expectations of the workers.
“At our request, she sent an inspection to the factory on two occasions, but in a fake way, because the inspection dealt with unimportant things and did not take into account the basic thing we were looking for. And that is to return the machines to our factory, illegally displaced during the strike, and to return to work a group of workers who worked on them,” Miljkovic said.
The dispute had not been resolved by the end of November.
