Manual labour is wide-spread in Serbia

Modul research on work skills reports that performing heavy physical work takes most of the working time of Serbian men and women with high school education, aged between 30 and 59. Nevertheless, social skills are used at work more by women, while using digital devices leads the way of highly educated men.
As the Modul research on work skills reports, “communication with people from the same company or organization” was the most used work skill in Serbia. It means that about 90 percent of respondents are engaged in verbal business communication with colleagues during working hours and approximately 70 percent of them in communication with people outside the company or organization.
Heavy physical work engages about 60 percent of workers, of which 26 percent do heavy labour half of the working time or more and 31 percent less than half of the working time.
Cognitive skills, such as reading instructions and working on calculations involving fractions, percentages, and more complex mathematical functions, are not used at work at all by more than 50 percent of men while only about 5 percent of workers use them most of their working time.
The situation with women does not differ much. Cognitive abilities are not used at all by more than half of the respondents and they are used during most of the working time by only 6 or 7 percent of them.
The difference between the genders in manual skills is more significant. The number of women who spend most of their working time on manual tasks is about 18 percent, while that number among men is about 5 percent higher (about 23 percent).
The president of the Association of Free and Independent Trade Unions (ASNS), Ranka Savić, says that manual labour is mostly required by low-budget foreign investments that are coming to Serbia, so these data are easy to explain. Overworking and spending one hundred percent of their working time in physically demanding jobs are among many workers’ complaints. It’s easy to set one of many cable factories as an example. The entire working day is spent by the workers standing, without ever having a chance to sit down and rest. Monotonous activities are performed by the employees with their hands constantly engaged. In retail the situation doesn’t differ much: the workers unload the goods, stack them on the shelves and operate cash registers all their working day.
According to Miloš Turinski, PR of the job search website Infostud, jobs such as administration and retail are mostly applied for by women, while more difficult physical jobs are mostly opted for by men. He also highlights that Serbia currently has the biggest deficit of trade and IT workers while speaking about the demand for labour.

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