President of the Confederation of Autonomous Trade Unions of Vojvodina (SSSV) Goran Milic said that from this number, between 50,000 and 60,000 will be dismissed from the public sector and the rest from companies in the restructuring process that will go bankrupt.

"New amendments to labor legislation have been announced and new layoffs, which will bring us perhaps a worse year than 2014 was," he told reporters during the traditional end-of-year conference.

A new labor law should be passed at the end of next year, noted Milic, stressing that trade unions expect it to result from a compromise reached among all partners in the social dialogue, "in order to avoid once again changing a law because it was not applied, as we were told when the current one was being adopted."

It is high time that the government, employers and trade unions begin to respect each other and that all labor legislation comes from a compromise, as is the case "everywhere else in the world," said Milic.

Unions will next year seek to "negotiate using arguments" with the other two social partners, "and we hope that the other side will do the same, because at stake are human lives and livelihoods of people, not the will of some individuals," said Milic.