For more than half a year, the state-owned companies, Pljevlja Coal Mine and Montenegrin Electric Enterprise (EPCG), have been hiding most of the data on the number of people they employed, and this practice continued even after the announcement of local elections. Employment on a party basis continued to be one of the key mechanisms for building the voter base, which is why MANS requested access to information on the number of newly hired staff from the largest state-owned companies.
Pljevlja Coal Mine, which has been fully owned by the state since the end of 2018, has rejected requests for free access to information, declaring all types of contracts it has signed with new employees since the beginning of this year trade secret. In his answer to MANS, the executive director of the Coal Mine, Milan Lekić, referred to the internal document of the Rulebook on trade secret, even though he was obliged to implement the Law on Free Access to Information.
Data on how many new contracts have been awarded since the beginning of the year is also hidden by Montenegrin Electric Enterprise, which since the beginning of this year has not responded to a single request for free access to information on new employees submitted to it by MANS.
Mass employment in Solar-Gradnja, names of the new employees hidden
The data that MANS still managed to obtain using the Law on Free Access to Information show that since the beginning of this year, on various grounds, as many as 493 people have been employed in the subsidiary company of EPCG, “EPCG Solar-Gradnja”. Out of that number, most of the so-called “fixed-term” contracts were awarded, i.e. 228, 129 temporary employment contracts were concluded, while the rest were hired through agencies for employment mediation.
And while they provided information on the number of new employees, the management of “Solar-Gradnja” refused to publish the names of the persons with whom they entered into contracts, under the pretense of privacy protection.
Unfortunately, the examples of these companies bear witness to the continuation of the disastrous practice established by the previous management, while the new one, which is exclusively composed according to the party affiliation, shows no intention to end it.
Recruitment by party affiliation or by the so-called “depth” is one of the mechanisms of influence on voters that the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) used intensively before each election. Unfortunately, after the political changes of 2020, we are still witnessing the outrageous capture of state-owned companies, now by the former opposition parties.
Data on the work of the state-owned companies, including those related to employment policy, must be public information, especially in the pre-election period. That is why MANS once again urges the mentioned companies to fully implement the Law on Free Access to Information without delay, and make the required data on new employees public.
MANS
