The workers were collectively fired because they failed to report to the company management in exile at the start of the war in 1991, but stayed working in the factory during the Serb occupation of Vukovar.
The secretary of the association, Savo Davidovic, said that the association wanted the Borovo management to recognise the pensionable years of service of workers who had been laid off in 1991, their right to severance pay and the right to severance pay for workers who had retired in the meantime.
Davidovic recalled a protest rally his association had staged outside the factory in mid-September, and said that the government and relevant ministries had been notified of their demands. "All in all, the workers are left with no other option but to go out into the street," he added.
"Our protest has nothing to do with what happened in Vukovar in 1991. This is a struggle for our livelihood and has nothing to do with politics and ethnic differences," Davidovic said.
Davidovic said he was unhappy that his association was described as a Serb organisation. "Of the 3,700 members, more than 1,000 are not Serbs. Injustice was done to all of us together," he said.
Meanwhile, the Vukovar-Srijem County association of Croatian disabled war veterans condemned the announced protest by the former Borovo workers.
"The announced blockade of roads evokes in all of us bad memories of 1990 when roadblocks were put up in towns and villages predominantly populated by Serbs, and of the suffering of the non-Serb population, mainly Croats, in 1991," the war veterans' association said in a statement on Tuesday.
"The question arises as to why the rebel Serbs, during the self-styled Serb Krajina, did not block the roads in Vukovar when Borovo's equipment was transported across the Danube to Serbia on the eve of the peaceful reintegration (of the Serb-occupied area into Croatia)," the statement said.
It added that the disabled Croatian Homeland War veterans in Vukovar-Srijem County "fully respect the will of any Croatian citizen to exercise their lawful rights and to express their discontent in accordance with law".
"At the same time we want everyone to know that no one, the association of Borovo workers included, will block our town, Vukovar, and if necessary, we will use force to prevent it," said the statement signed by the head of the war veterans' association, Stjepan Sucic.