Occupational safety training for foreign workers in Serbia: the language the worker understands

Serbia's Occupational Safety and Health Act, published in Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia 35/2023, requires that training for safe and healthy work be delivered in a language the employee understands. For a foreign worker that means the session and the safety data sheet in their own language, not a signature on a Serbian form. Company fines reach 1,500,000 dinars.

What a language the employee understands means

The wording is defined rather than descriptive. The 2023 Occupational Safety and Health Act states that a language the employee understands is the employee's mother tongue, a language in official use that the employee speaks, reads and writes, or a language set as a condition for performing the job. Three options, and all three are evidenced from the employee's own file.

That gives a practical test for an employer hiring workers from Nepal, India or the Philippines. If the job description did not require knowledge of Serbian, and the worker does not speak, read or write Serbian, then training delivered in Serbian does not satisfy the Act, however neatly the training record is signed. The same holds for training in English where English is neither the worker's mother tongue nor a job requirement.

The Act also requires training to be adapted to particular groups of employees. Foreign workers, young employees and workers on temporary assignments fall into groups for which a standard lecture is not enough, so the content is matched to the job, the equipment and the level of previous experience.

The translation duty goes beyond the session itself. The employer must provide a translation of the safety data sheet into a language the employee understands. On a construction site or in production involving chemicals, that means the sheet must exist in a readable version at the place where the substance is used, not only in the safety officer's archive.

Deadlines, supervision and the size of the fines

Supervision sits with the Ministry of Labour, Employment, Veteran and Social Affairs, through the Directorate for Occupational Safety and Health and the Labour Inspectorate. The 2023 Act gave employers a transition period, and the deadline for full alignment with the new statute was 7 May 2025 (Paragraf, daily news of 29 April 2025). From that date an inspector expects an aligned risk assessment act, the records and the training evidence in the form the Act prescribes.

The penalty side was tightened. The Occupational Safety and Health Act 35/2023 sets out 73 offences, and the maximum fines were doubled against the previous statute (Paragraf, analysis of the Act). A fine for a legal entity runs from 800,000 to 1,500,000 dinars, for instance where the risk assessment was never carried out or mandatory training of an employee was skipped.

How this is organised on site

The sequence that survives an inspection has four steps. First, a language inventory: before the group arrives, record each worker's mother tongue and level of Serbian in their file, because that entry decides which language the training must use. Second, translation of the materials, the work instructions and the safety data sheets for substances actually used at that workplace. Third, the session itself, with an interpreter or on translated material, and a record that states explicitly which language it was delivered in. Fourth, the competence check, in the same language.

The costliest mistake only surfaces after an accident. A worker from Nepal signs a training record in Serbian on the first day, three months later there is an injury on a machine, and the investigation finds the worker did not understand the instruction for stopping it. The signed record does not protect the employer, because the Act asks for understanding, not a signature. The offence is assessed per employee, so twenty people trained in the wrong language is not one failure but twenty. What else an inspector looks for is covered in our note on accommodation duties for foreign workers, and arrival week registrations in the guide to social insurance registration.

Translating the training and the safety data sheets is a line item planned alongside the group's arrival, in the same week as the medical examination and the insurance registration. Its cost is small against the fine range, and it belongs in the total set out in our cost breakdown for hiring a foreign worker in Serbia and in the material for employers.