Articles by Aleksandar Matkovic

About Aleksandar Matkovic

Aleksandar Matković (1988) is a Serbian theorist and political activist, dealing mainly with contemporary Marxism and the political economy of fascism, the history of Yugoslav self-management and theories of biopolitics. He currently works as a researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade and is completing his PhD studies in philosophy at the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Ljubljana. He is member of the Editorial Committee of the Encyclopédie internationale de l’autogestion and editorial board of the Serbian journal "Stvar".
August 28, 2019

“Red Tape”: the Labor Crisis in Europe’s Most Unequal Country

by Aleksandar Matkovic  

Note from LeftEast editors: This is Part I of “Serbia’s Labor Law: a Counter-Proposal” reprinted from the author’s blog with his kind permission. I went to work in the morning and returned late in the evening. And on Sunday I had to go to work. I did not have any free time anymore. The owner of the company increased the volume of work but did not increase the number of us who are working. For every mistake, he took a part of our salaries, so I often did not get even the minimum (wage). He never paid out our hot meals, vacation and travel expenses, although we all signed that we had received them. We h ..

September 4, 2017

The open violence of the Balkan labour reforms: an interview with Aleksandar Matković

by Aleksandar Matkovic  

The following interview between Petar Protić and Aleksandar Matković originally appeared in Serbo-Croatian at Al Jazeera Balkans and concerns the recent labour laws that have been carried out almost simultaneously across several Balkan countries, each bearing similar tendencies: a weakening of workers’ rights and a strengthening of the rights of employers, the increase of precarious work and employers arbitrarily assigning work times as they see fit. These labour reforms form one of the central topics of the interview. Protić: Recently the Chinese company Hesteel Serbia, which operates the Smederevo ironwork ..

April 6, 2016

What Europe are we sacrificed for? TTIP and its lasting consequences

by Aleksandar Matkovic  

The following piece was originally published in Serbian at Masina.rs. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a free trade agreement that will soon be signed between the United States and the European Union. According to the website of the European Commission (EC), this agreement ‘removes custom duties’ and ‘barriers to investment’, which allegedly impede trade between the US and EU. However, as the US already has agreements on the abolition of custom duties with the majority of countries with which it trades, and as the very existence of the EU was founded on such agreements, the ..

July 27, 2014

Struggling Against Serbia’s New Labour Law (part 2)

by Aleksandar Matkovic  

The laws have been passed and the cards have been dealt: the new reform of the labour and pension laws which were so hastily proposed to parliament this January, have finally been adopted[i]. These “reforms” legitimize precarious work from the cradle to the grave: they do so, among else, by increasing and flexibilizing work hours, cutting down basic social welfare and extending the pension limit up to 65 years of working life. They will thus make drastic changes to the way all work will be done, paid and secured in the years to come. In Serbia, where the minimum wage is already the lowest in the world, this c ..

January 12, 2014

Struggling Against Serbia’s New Labour Law

by Aleksandar Matkovic  

On December 20 2013, state sponsored hearings on the new labor law in Serbia were cancelled just as they were supposed to begin. The first public hearings were scheduled for Novi Sad, while subsequent hearings were to take place in Kragujevac and Belgrade. However, before the day was over, all the hearings had been called off. Serbia’s Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Policy (MLESP) first blamed the unions for ‘obstructing’ the proceedings, and then canceled all further hearings, arguing that: “All those interested may submit their proposals, suggestions and complaints on the Draft of the Law on t ..