Access Blocked to Vietnamese Workers Allegedly Exploited in Serbia: NGOs
November 16, 2021
Serbian NGOs claim they have been denied access to workers from Vietnam who were
brought to the country to build a factory for a Chinese company and are
allegedly labouring and living in grim conditions. A11, an
NGO dealing with violations of workers’ rights, said that private security men
arrived at the construction site for a factory for Chinese tyre manufacturer
Shandong Linglong Tire in the city of Zrenjanin on Tuesday and began blocking
access to Vietnamese workers who have been the focus of exploitation allegations
this week. “Access
to the Vietnamese workers has been prevented, private security has appeared,
black jeeps and a lot of unknown people who do not want to introduce themselves
and are preventing access to and conversation with the workers,” A11 said in a
statement on Twitter. Around
500 workers from Vietnam who were hired to work on the construction of the
factory are living and working in conditions that could endanger their health
and lives, A11 and a Serbian anti-trafficking NGO, ASTRA, have claimed. The
Vietnamese workers’ labour rights are being seriously violated and there are
indications that they could be the victims of trafficking for the purpose of
labour exploitation, the NGOs have alleged. ASTRA
told BIRN that the NGOs have informed the authorities about their concerns but
have received no response so far. “We sent
our report to numerous institutions, but we have no update on the outcome. The
only thing we know is that the police went there [to the construction site]
yesterday for an inspection,” Tina Piskulidis from ASTRA told BIRN. “For now
we are collecting food and clothes for the workers because they lack all of
that,” she said. The two
NGOs have visited the construction site in Zrenjanin, a city in Serbia’s
northern province of Vojvodina, where the Vietnamese workers are building a
factory for the Shandong Linglong Tire company from China, which has been
subsidised by the Serbian state and publicly praised by officials. According
to the NGOs’ report, the Vietnamese workers are sleeping in cramped dormitories,
only have two toilets for 500 people, and lack clean and warm water. They also
have a lack of food, causing some of them to hunt small animals nearby. Their
working hours are often longer then allowed under the law, their salaries are
often late, and when they are paid, it is in cash, according to the NGOs. Their
employer does not provide personal protection equipment and deducts the costs of
some of their working equipment from their salaries, the NGOs further allege. “They are
recruited by a Vietnamese agency for the benefit of the Chinese company with a
Serbian branch, and those contracts are for 12 months. Those contracts are in
English, but only one of them knows English, so they did not even know what they
are signing,” said Piskulidis. She said
that many facts indicate that they could be victims of human trafficking. “Their
passports have been taken from them, none of them has a working permit document,
and they have restrictions on their movement and communications,” she said. She added
that there is no date on their contracts to indicate when their employment
started, “and they cannot go home by plane because they do not have enough
money”. BIRN
contacted Shandong Linglong Tire for comment on Tuesday but the company did not
respond by the time of publication. The
workers are officially hired by China Energy Engineering Group Tianjin Electric
Power Construction Co. Ltd, registered in Belgrade, Serbia. The company was
hired by the Chinese company Shandong Linglong Tire for the construction site of
the car tyre factory in Zrenjanin. The
Vietnamese intermediaries who brought the workers to Serbia are so far unknown. The
Serbian government has been heavily promoting the project, despite critics
accusing it of illegality, labour exploitation and potentially harming the
environment as the tyre industry is known for pollution. In 2019,
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic attended a ceremony at which the foundation
stone for the factory was laid, and said that “history is being written” for
Zrenjanin, the surrounding Banat county and Serbia. The
Chinese owners received 95 hectares of land free of charge whose value was
estimated at 7.6 million euros. They will
also receive 75 million euros in subsidies from the budget for the employment of
at least 1,200 workers by the end of 2024, according to a decision by the
Commission for the Control of State Aid. A BIRN
investigation in January 2021, ‘Like
Prisoners’: Chinese Workers in Serbia Complain of Exploitation’,
cited evidence that Chinese workers at the Zijin Mining Group Co. in Bor, a town
in eastern Serbia, were working in poor conditions. The
evidence raised serious questions about the conditions facing Chinese workers in
Serbia and the readiness of the Serbian authorities to intervene and risk
damaging an increasingly important diplomatic and investment relationship with
China.
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