It is now too late to stay the payment of regress to teachers, nurses and many others, due at the end of June
Due to the lack of inertia and obvious dysfunction of the current government, the state budget might receive a serious hit – around 180 thousand public servants, employees in education, health, culture and social workers, are currently expecting news of a regress which, according to the Basic Collective Agreement for public services, must be paid by the end of June. The amount of regress is set at 1,250 Kuna, meaning the state needs to come up with 225 million Kuna soon, Poslovni Dnevnik writes on June 12, 2016..
This is hard to expect as at the beginning of the current mandate, government officials said that there is no money for additional material rights of budget beneficiaries. The failed and rare negotiations with trade unions also led to no agreement. Unlike the Milanović government, which suspended this right along with Christmas bonuses through a special law, the Orešković government made no such regulation.
The Constitutional Court did warn last year, without denying the right of government to legally intervene into assets, that such a law cannot be extend without consulting other parties of the Collective Agreement, in the interest of finding acceptable solutions.
This question, among others, was to be settled through talks between government officials and trade unions. The government appointed Deputy PM Božo Petrov to negotiate with trade unions. The talks and negotiations, as far as is known, have not gone far, while the government did not enable any regulation to “legally” withhold rights from the Collective Agreement.
“The situation dictates that the payoff is not in question, while it’s clear that the money has not been secured. The government, whichever one it may be, can solve this in only two ways: the cheaper one, meaning to find the money, or the expensive one, meaning we will be forced to sue which could double the cost,” said Željko Stipić, president of Preporod trade union.
