AUDIO Workers Warn of ‘Legal Rape’

Workers of the Agency for Management of State Property (AUDIO) do not want to become civil servants employed by the State Office for Management of State Property (DUUDI), as proposed by the draft law on the management and disposal of state property, and will, if the Croatian Parliament adopts such a proposal, attempt to protect their labor rights in court.

The draft law in Article 81 stipulates that workers will be taken over from DUUDI and become civil servants on the day the law comes into force, which is illegal and unconstitutional, it was stated at today’s gathering of workers held at AUDIO’s premises.

This is ‘legal rape’ of workers who have contractual relationships with AUDIO, and they should not be turned into civil servants against their will, said the president of the Croatian Association of Trade Unions, Ozren Matijašević.

If the Parliament votes for such a text of the law tomorrow, the union will request a constitutional review and assist workers in filing lawsuits. It is sad that the workers of AUDIO, despite our appeal to parliamentary clubs, were not mentioned in the parliamentary debate, which shows that they are perceived as agency inventory, Matijašević said.

Due to this issue, we have requested a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Branko Grčić, and tomorrow morning we will organize the distribution of leaflets to parliamentary representatives to warn them not to raise their hands for the illegal proposal, Matijašević says.

The president of the Union of Employees in State Offices, Agencies, and Funds of Croatia, Ernestina Varaždinec, warned that due to lawsuits, the state could again incur significant costs. About thirty former AUDIO workers have sued the agency because their former director, Vedran Duvnjak, refused to pay them severance pay, which will ultimately cost taxpayers 15 million kuna, she said.

She dismissed Deputy Prime Minister Grčić’s accusations that AUDIO is inefficient and does nothing. “We are not idlers; we work on the register of state property, but we are not to blame for the fact that state bodies do not send us data about the property,” Varaždinec says.

In the case of being transferred to civil servants, 219 AUDIO workers would lose rights from their previous employment contracts, would be left without severance pay, and their salaries could fall by 30 to 40 percent. We demand that they transfer the rights from the employment contracts to us or pay us severance pay, Varaždinec stated.