Minister of Labour and Pension System Josip Aladrovic said on Tuesday, after a meeting with unions in the Health Ministry regarding a wage increase that a new meeting would be held in the ministry to discuss the financial impact of the negotiations on Friday, August 23.

“At today’s meeting we defined the topics that will be discussed and who will conduct the new negotiations that we launched. Demands were not presented today, we just talked about a previous demand and that it continues to be current,” Aladrovic told reporters after the meeting.

He announced that at the meeting on Friday, the talks will discuss the financial impact of those negotiations.

“We did not discuss any figures today but naturally the unions highlighted that their demands remain at the level that was previously initialed. The negotiations will continue for some time, we will talk, we will see what the fiscal possibilities are and what the state budget’s possibilities are and what can be realistically expected,” he said.

Aladrovic presumes an agreement will be reached.

“The government’s starting position, as we said earlier, is that we will advocate a horizontal wage increase, by increasing the base wage. However, this branch collective agreement is valid until October 31 and we are aware of that responsibility and we expect to find common ground,” he added.

Govt negotiation team to be appointed in cabinet on Thursday

Finance Minister Zdravko Maric underscored that today’s meeting was not intended to adopt any special conclusion or any big decisions considering that there is a formal step that need to be taken and that is to appoint a government negotiation team and that will be done on Thursday at the cabinet meeting.

He did not specify how much the government is prepared to offer physicians, saying that everything will be discussed. “There is room for talk at meetings and we will discuss that among other things,” he said.

Negotiation teams on behalf of the government and health sector unions met on Tuesday morning in the Health Ministry to launch negotiations on a wage increase in the health sector after the government did not accept the increase that had been agreed to during negotiations on the collective agreement held in July.

An agreement was signed in the Health Ministry on July 31 to extend the Collective Agreement for workers in health and health insurance with two unions however the government did not accept an initialed wage increase for 72,000 workers in the system and instead announced further negotiations.