Belgrade Pharmacies Pay First of 16 Overdue Salaries

Payment of the sixteen overdue salaries and severance packages owed to employees of the Belgrade Pharmacies institution began on Friday, September 18. According to Jelena Sikuljak, president of the Opstanak union, the first payments landed in workers’ accounts before noon, and the process continued throughout the day.

The payments, Sikuljak said, started at 1 p.m., and the amounts vary from one employee to another: some have so far received a single overdue paycheck, others three or four, depending on how many months each individual was owed. Sikuljak described to Tanjug what she had been told to expect from the institution’s management.

“We were told they will try to pay out, over the course of today, the entire amount owed to employees. If that doesn’t happen today, because of banking hours, the full payment will be completed on Monday,” Sikuljak said.

So if the technical side of the payment system does not allow everything to be settled by the end of Friday, the remainder of the debt will reach accounts by Monday at the latest. The union accepted that deadline as realistic rather than as an unfunded promise: the first payment had already arrived, and that is what sets this payout apart from earlier announcements that stayed only words.

The last paycheck Belgrade Pharmacies employees received before this wave of payments was an advance for April 2025, Danas reports, citing Forbes Serbia. That means the institution had been behind on payments for more than a year and a half before Friday, and the count of sixteen overdue salaries did not appear all at once but built up over months.

The day before the payments began, the institution itself announced that the Finance Ministry had transferred funds to the City of Belgrade’s account, earmarked specifically for paying the overdue salaries and severance packages. The City of Belgrade is the founder of the pharmacy institution, so the money passes through its account before reaching workers.

Sources differ on the exact date when Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic promised a solution to this problem. B92 reports that Vucic made the promise during a conversation with union representatives on July 20, while Danas cites a meeting and an agreement from July 28. Both sources agree the promise came after a meeting between the president and the union, but they disagree on the date of that meeting.

At a press conference on Friday, the Opstanak union laid out how much of that meeting’s conclusions had actually been fulfilled. Of four points agreed, one, they said, was carried out in full: certifying employees’ health insurance booklets. The second, paying overdue salaries, is being carried out right now. The remaining two, settling debts owed to suppliers and securing operating funds for the institution, still need to be resolved.

“Looking at the rebalanced budget of the Secretariat for Health, funds have been planned, and we hope that public procurement will be carried out soon,” the Opstanak union said in a statement.

The union added that Belgrade Pharmacies is expected to request operating funds sometime next week, but that public procurement procedures carry their own legal deadlines, so they hope the institution will be able to return to normal operations starting in early October. Until then, they said, the institution depends on the city’s help to cover its current expenses.

Ahead of the conference, union representatives also said the situation remains fragile: the institution, they said, is currently short one paycheck’s worth of funds again, since it has not received operating money, and they hope the city will cover that cost. The union cannot verify the part about supplier debts on its own, since that part, they say, rests entirely with the government and the City of Belgrade.

Srpske Novine reported on September 16 that Belgrade Pharmacies employees were waiting on sixteen and a half overdue salaries. With payments now underway since Friday, that debt is shrinking in practice for the first time since April 2025, not just being promised. Belgrade Pharmacies had earlier expressed hope that, alongside this payout, the institution would also receive systemic support to fully recover and continue operating within Serbia’s healthcare system.