As part of the cooperation within the project “Empowerment of Legal Aid Providers to Fight Gender Based Discrimination in the Labor Market in BiH” we bring you text of the journalist from portal focus.ba, Mirna Duhaček, on gender based discrimination and providers of the free legal aid.
“The quiet revolution has been started, the workers will no longer be silent”, Dražan Pejaković, the founder of the Workers’ Movement, is optimistic, who believes that in the past, workers rarely decided to react to the problems they faced, because there was no one to represent them and protect them. Now a team of 46 lawyers from all over BiH works for the disenfranchised. Employees in the real sector in Bosnia and Herzegovina will soon get their own version of the union. We are talking about the Workers’ Movement, which leader is Dražan Pejaković. After feeling the hard way, on his own skin, what it means when workers’ rights are violated, he decided, taught by his own experience, to get involved and help others so that they would not experience the same thing as him. He founded the Facebook group Black List of Employers of Republic of Srpska, which in a short time grew to 35 thousand members. For many, the group became a space of freedom, so bitter experiences of mobbing, discrimination and various forms of exploitation and underestimation by employers began to be shared in it.
WOMEN SUFFER THE MOST
In order to further justify the trust he received, he decided to found an association. Although the Workers’ Movement is in its infancy – a street campaign has just been announced across BH cities, during which they will inform citizens about services and goals and start gathering members – Pejaković has been helping disenfranchised workers for 19 months with a team of lawyers from all over Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“Most of the reports we receive are related to gender-based discrimination. Women suffer the most,” says Pejaković in an interview with Fokus.
This is exactly what was shown by the second survey of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly (HCA) of Banjaluka authored by Svjetlana Ramić Marković, conducted in 2021, entitled “Gender-Based Discrimination in the Field of Labour in Bosnia and Herzegovina” – as many as 46% of women and 15% of men stated that have experienced gender-based discrimination in their workplace. However, as stated in the research, of the persons who experienced such discrimination, 78% of women and 69% of men did not report it to the competent institution, while only seven women initiated court proceedings due to discrimination at work.
Full version of the article is available at: https://www.fokus.ba/
