I think that the announced reduction of travel reimbursements in the JU (for a start, we can assume that sooner or later this will also happen in the economy) is discriminatory towards citizens who do not live in the capital or in major cities.
Example: my partner and I commute to work 60km away. We each drive our own car because otherwise we cannot pick up our children at nursery or school within the 9 hours that day care lasts. The transport reimbursement already barely covers the petrol costs, everything else (servicing, tyres, insurance, vignette) comes out of the net salary received.
The government's proposal to drastically reduce the cost of transport reimbursement in SA means that all of us living within about 1 hour of the capital will be paying most of the transport costs out of our net earnings. This means that workers on lower wages may fall below the minimum wage due to transport costs. Many people will think, why spend two hours commuting every day, working for a low wage on which they have to pay for transport to get to work and, on the same wage, perhaps a more expensive kindergarten - when they can stay at home, with less social support, look after the child themselves, not pay for the kindergarten, and have a bit of a 'fuck off' on top of it. On that basis, I dare say that this measure is one of those that will set women back behind the stove because of the relatively small residual earnings (no nursery fees, no bigger allowance, no grants, no commuting hours, etc...).
So, as a citizen, I wonder - is it fair that the state gives preference to the citizen who lives closer to the capital (or another major city)? And penalises the one who lives in the countryside so that he has to significantly reduce his disposable income in order to even get to work? We all know that there are few job opportunities in smaller places and that many citizens migrate daily to larger places.
As a citizen, this is what the state is saying to me with this measure - get out of the countryside and move to the cities, all of you.
What does this mean for Ljubljana, for example - more congestion on the roads, higher property prices, more strain on kindergartens, schools, health centres, etc.? Is this really what we want? I think that a 0.5 to 1h drive from work is too short a drive to expect people to move to a place of work. Or is it?
Proposal: recruit in a JU as close as possible to the place of employment, otherwise reimburse at actual transport costs at least up to 50 km from the place of employment (i.e. - half an hour's drive on the motorway or an hour's drive on a regional road).