Yugoslavia - Working conditions

About a quarter of Serbs are officially unemployed, but the number rises to 50 percent if people in insolvent companies are included. Over-staffing and underpayment in most remaining firms mean that few workers have real jobs. The way to provide people with sustainable livelihoods is to revive the companies with capacity to provide new jobs. These companies must end their isolation and become able to export. Labor activism was instrumental in ousting Milosevic and could hardly be underestimated as an economic factor in a country with largely socialist traditions. Unions will influence economic decisions, as workers, having taken control of their companies from Milosevic's managers, are pushing for reversal of the privatization schemes that benefited Milosevic's cronies. Revisions of these privatization deals seem more likely than elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

By late 1999, about 2 million people were employed in the state sector, about a million and a half in industry and agriculture, and the rest in education, government, and services. Slightly more than 300,000 were employed in private sector trade and services, and 560,000 were independent farmers, while up to 1 million, including most Serb refugees from Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, engaged in subsistence agriculture and lived in deep poverty.