The issue of national identity is taken seriously by Balkan people – including the least serious among them.
Waves of Strikes Threaten Serbia
Belgrade | 01 May 2009 | By Jovana Gligorijevic
Union members march through the centre of Belgrade.
Serbia is facing a wave of strikes and industrial protests as workers lose patience with the government’s anti-crisis measures and unemployent levels worsen.
On Wednesday, the Association of Independent Unions of Serbia, held a protest against the government’s measures and invited all other trade unions in Serbia to join them.
The association’s president Ljubisav Obrovic said that the burden of the crisis was being placed on the poor and the middle class, which is why they opposed the government’s measures.
But in the end, the protest was smaller than expected and only 3,000 took part. Other unions stayed away.
The country’s current unemployement rate is 14 per cent. But the National Employement Service has already said it expects this figure to climb to 17 per cent by the end of this year.
Workers under 30 are faring worst. The unemployement rate in this category is close to 40 per cent, according to the employment service. Almost 30,000 people have lost their jobs since the start of 2009 alone, and this number is certain to grow as the government plans to cut the number of civil servants by 10 per cent by the end of the year.
The government says it will provide financial support for employers in the private sector who take on young staff. But plans to offset cuts in the number of state employees by boosting jobs in the private sector are widely seen as unrealistic.
The administrations wider measures to counter the crisis are unlikely to be fully crystallised until discussions with international bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF are finally concluded and the government resolves the internal differences amongst the ruling coalition.
However, some measures have already been proposed, including cutting costs and spending by civil servants, and the introduction of taxes on mobile phones, petrol and luxury cars and yachts.
The number of small and medium-sized enterprises has shrunk since the beginning of 2009, with more than 10,000 businesses ceasing trading, according to the agency for industrial registers.
Job losses, falling pay and delays in salary payments have meanwhile fed a mood of industrial militancy - which does nothing to improve the country’s economic prospects.
Waves of strikes have hit the industrial sector, most dramatically in Novi Pazar, in south-west Serbia, where workers at the Raska textile firm, angry over unpaid wages, went on strike last Thursday.
In a radical personal gesture, local strike leader, Zoran Bulatovic, cut off part of his own finger and ate it in front of reporters.
Other strikers threatened to do likewise. “I am prepared to do the same. I will go to the end,” Senada Rebronja, a single mother with three children - one with special needs - said. She is one of a number of striking textile workers from Raska locked inside the offices of the Association of Textile Workers, protesting against what they say is government indifference to their plight.
The strikers want to be paid for all the unpaid work they have done between 1993 and the time they stopped working.
The Raska textile mill, which once employed around 4,000 workers, is reportedly close to bankruptcy. Several months ago the city council said it would re-nationalise the company, but after the rhetoric, little progress has been made.
At a meeting with the striking workers on Tuesday, government officials agreed that the Raska workers would have access to welfare programmes, in addition to the pay that they are owed and the workers withdrew from their threats of further self-mutilation.
However, Zoran Bulatovic, president of the Association of Textile Workers in Novi Pazar, as well as the local strike leader, said that if the government did not make good on its promises, strikers would resume the grisly acts.
Bulatovic said that if necessary, he would cut off his own arm and send it to the government.
But Rasim Ljajic, Labour Minister, on Monday told reporters that he had no optimistic message to take to hard-pressed employees in Serbia.
Describing the economic situation as serious, he said there was a “great neccesity for unity among all the relevant actors, such as unions, government and the social services, who must urgently start a dialogue that will help in seeking a solution.”
Ljajic thus became the first government minister to admit, not only that the current situation was dire, but that it could not be solved by the existing anti-crisis measures alone.
At an international conference last weekend, well known analyst, Vladimir Gligorov, critisised the current crisis measures of various Balkan governments as inadequate and wrongheaded.
“The goal of good social politics is not to prevent your citizens from starving, but to keep them capable of spending because if you have no spending, there is no production either,” he said.
The government in Serbia can draw comfort, however, from the current disunity among the country’s many trade unions which failed to join the Belgrade protests
Ranka Savic, president of the Association of Free and Independent Unions, told the FoNet Agency that her organisation had sent written support but did not join the rally because its goals were unclear.
The “Independence” trade union announced that it disagreed with the demonstrators’ stance on the government’s measures.
It thus remains unclear whether the fractured trade unions in Serbia will be able to mobilise strikers and the newly unemployed in an effective fashion.
Since the start of their protest in Novi Pazar, the striking textile workers have repeatedly said they place little faith in unions.
Sociologist, Darko Marinkovic, told the Novosti Daily that this scepticism was not surprising, as both employers and government found it easy to control union leaders in Serbia.
“The unions forgot that their purpose is fight for workers’ rights,” Marinkovic said.
“It’s easy for employers to control union leaders with petty privileges. It is enough to allow them to use the company car or something like that,” Marinkovic said.
