Struggles fuel discussion on legalizing strike action WORKERS' STRIKES have become widespread in Yugoslavia following the government's announcement at the end of February to freeze wages and bonus productivity payments. Angry workers have protested in all the regions of the country, despite the fact that strikes are illegal.
Last year, there were 50 per cent more strike actions than in 1985 as inflation reached the 100 per cent mark and unemployment rose to its present level of 1.2 million. Yugoslavia's economic crisis ... including a huge foreign debt -- has not only fuelled this latest strikewave, but also stimulated a major debate about the right of workers to strike in defence of living standards, equality and self-management. MICHELE LEE
YUGOSLAVIA Slovene action is extremely timely. Because it comes from an official body, moreover, it cannot be easily marginalized.
What is contained in the Slovene proposal? The case for legalization of strikes is argued on the grounds that their real cause cannot be reduced to the size of wage packets or the system of income distribution within an individual enterprise (though these do often provide the immediate motive). It should be sought rather in the actual distribution of power, which is seen by workers to be detrimental to their interests. The strike, therefore, should be legally recognized as a form of collective action aimed at changing the balance of power in an enterprise in the workers' favour, hence also an integral part of self-management.
The Law of Associated Labour, the fundamental law which regulates relations inside the enterprises (often referred to as the "mini Constitution",) does not deal with strike situations directly. In the relevant Article 638, methods for resolving conflicts within an enterprise that may or may not lead to strike action (termed merely a "work stoppage") are prescribed. And the trade union, party and relevant state bodies are indicated as proper channels for their resolution - the bodies through which workers should represent their demands and seek redress for their grievances. Law effectively denies right to strike
The article, however, stops short of dealing with the actual strike situation: strikes as such are absent from the law. Implicitly, however, a strike is treated not as a collective act, but as a breach of an individual workers' obligation to the enterprise, punishable in the last instance by dismissal.
Thus, the Law of Associated Labour effectively denies workers the right to strike - despite the fact that Yugoslavia is a signatory to several international conventions which instruct member states to respect this right.
The existing law is defective also in other ways. It does not ensure that any of the bodies mentioned
1. The Socialist Youth Alliance is the youth section of the Socialist Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia, the front organization of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) — the party that has ruled since 1945. Theoretically, the SYA includes all youth between the ages of 16 and 26. It is organized in all six federal units of Yugoslavia.
L
Slovenia, the national home of some two million Slovenes, is Yugoslavia's northernmost republic. It is also its richest, most industrialized and most literate part. Unemployment is here at the miraculously low level of around two per cent (the Yugoslav average is at least seven times higher). Wages, productivity and the social product per capita are the highest in the country. Women work, though this does not preclude considerable male chauvinism in social relations. Until a decade ago Slovenia, unlike other federal units, was also nationally homogeneous. Today, however, some 10 per cent of its population comes from other Yugoslav areas, and this has introduced a degree of national friction.
Slovenia is also home to a uniquely flourishing youth culture. A lively interest in rock music, avant-garde poetry, films and architecture overlaps with and is stimulated by a host of vigorous "alternative" movements on such issues as peace, ecology, feminism, psychoanalysis and so on. There is a plethora of publications. Some, like Casopis za kritiko znanosti, with impeccable Marxist credentials; others like Problemi, more in tune with the new libertarian sensitivities.
A structural underpinning of this cultural and political rebirth of Slovene youth has been the Socialist Youth Alliance of Slovenia (SYAS). (1) SYAS publishes a weekly paper Mladina (Youth), with a print-run of around 15,000 copies, which has become required reading for Yugo-
1861 91 slavia's top politicians. This is because it has been a key instrument in popularizing various SYAS proposals which over the past two years have polarized (if not obsessed) Yugoslav public opinion. These have ranged from proposals to end conscription to the abolition of capital punishment.
On December 31, 1986, SYAS formally requested its parent body in Slovenia to open a debate on legal and constitutional changes that would give Yugoslav workers the formal right to strike. Public holidays spared the officialdom the embarassment of producing an instant response. But there is little doubt that the right to strike will be one of the main topics of debate in 1987.
There now exists in Yugoslavia something which, though small in absolute numbers, can nonetheless be described as a strike movement: barely a day goes by without workers in some factory going on strike. So the question of strike regulation is pushing itself irresistibly onto the political agenda.
This year is, moreover, likely to be a very bleak year for the Yugo. slav economy. [See box.] There is already a considerable pressure building up to curtail even further public consumption. This will be very dif. ficult, given the already very low wages of the workers. Their likely resistance will help to keep strikes in the focus of public attention. Furthermore, the federal government is itself preparing changes in the basic Law of Associated Labour. (2) Hence the
above actually speak on behalf of the workers in their conflict with enter prise management. It also sets no limit on how long a management is allowed to deliberate on workers' demands. Once a decision is made, moreover, the workers themselves cannot seek redress against it - this is something that only trade unions are allowed to do.
The existing law, therefore, does not ensure proper representation of workers' interests. And because it treats strikes as breaches of duty by individual workers, it encourages management to reduce the problem of strikes to one of witchhunting strike participants and strike leaders.
So the Slovene draft argues that the law should be changed to recognize the right of workers to strike and should treat strikes as forms of collec. tive action. Once this was done, then the duties and responsibilities of each side in a strike situation could be spelt out (for example, the protection of social property). Not only workers as such, but also trade unions, should be given the right to initiate strike action. A time limit of two days should be imposed on management to make their decision, and if either side appeals to a state body (commune or republic - in Yugoslav law, communes are responsible for enterprises in their locality, but republics can override them), then the time limit could be extended to fifteen days. Discrepancy between theory and practice
The draft concludes by pointing out several advantages that the legalization of strikes would bring. By allowing a proper articulation of labour conflicts, it would also ensure a better and more lasting resolution of them. It would protect striking workers, but would also strengthen the enterprise council's powers to make the final agreement work. It would help to reduce the incidence of so-called "grey" strikes: frequent sick leave, go-slows or reduced productivity. And it would allow a better monitoring and analysis of labour relations in the economy as a whole.
This draft was sent to the leading bodies of the Slovene and all- Yugo. slav Social Alliance. Meeting just before it was made public, the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Slovenia gave cautious support for a general debate on the subject. The Slovene party declared itself in favour of clarifying and improving the existing legislation, but stopped short of endorsing the central 8 demand: the right to strike itself. This public pronouncement : however, could only be indicative: the Slovene party, as part of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, has no right to issue policy statements until the federal party leadership has considered the matter.
The Slovene Socialist Youth Alliance's initiative represents the first occasion when an official body has publicly argued in favour of the right to strike for Yugoslav workers. Though not sanctioned by law, the right to strike has existed de facto for many years.
The full power of Article 638 is usually not applied against striking workers (though the same cannot be said for strike leaders). As is the custom in Yugoslavia, there is a wide discrepancy between theory and practice. The existing ambiguity - detrimental to the workers, but useful to the authorities - is largely favoured by the trade unions, since it provides a comfortable existence. The role of the trade unions is to prop up management; legalization of strikes would only cause it difficulties.
In an analysis prepared for the last party congress, it was shown that only 20 per cent of workers felt that trade unions played any role at all in the factories, while no more than 5 per cent saw them as actively engaged in labour disputes. Union policy has usually been neither to encourage nor directly to suppress such strikes as actually occur.
However the growing number of strikes prompted the Yugoslav union leadership to consider the issue at several meetings in the last three months of 1986. At these meetings, the Presidency of the Trade Union Alliance of Yugoslavia expressed itself satisfied with the status quo: strikes were described as "methods of working-class struggle inappropriate to a society in which the working class rules" . What has particularly upset the trade-union leadership has been the idea that they should be legally empowered to start strikes. Last November they firmly declared themselves against all attempts to place them in the role of opposition to the system". . Yet trade unions would also like to see their own role in conflictual situations more strictly defined (thus checking the development of a trend for local trade unions to join striking workers), but also because they are worried about certain new developments in the sphere of conflict management.
All in all, the question of strikes and their regulation is now firmly inscribed on the Yugoslav political agenda. This is not just because the actual number of strikes is growing. More important is the sheer extent of the Yugoslav economic crisis and the methods by which the country's leadership is proposing to deal with it - involving a systematic and massive onslaught on both the individual and the social wage. These are the crucial factors bringing to the fore the problem of how to deal with actual or potential working-class resistance.
In the currently raging debates on how far the economy should be independent from state control, two main issues have already crystallized: who should appoint managers and how much power managers should have within the enterprise. Up to now, the wider "socio-political community" has had the ultimate say in management appointments, while the local or republican state bodies have supervised the operation of the enterprise (depending on its size). Weakening direct democracy in the factories
Within the enterprise, it was formally the workers council, ultimately responsible to the enterprise assembly, which took the main decision. The government, however, is planning changes in the Basic Law of Associa ted Labour, which would alter the existing distribution of power by strengthening both managerial prerogatives and those of the workers' council at the expense of direct forms of democracy in the factories (such as the factory assembly, or the obligatory referenda among workers on all major decisions). The amendments may also provide for a greater freedom of enterprise management from the control of local state bodies, as well as encourage economic integration by facilitating dissolution of Basic Organizations into the larger Organizations of Associated Labour. (3) effecd in the pressments meth Judging by press reports, the
The Law of Associated Labour was adopted in 1976, completing the 1974 Constitution. It claimed to protect self-management from everything that had in reality undermined it in the past: state-controlled or technocratic relations; forms of "collective ownership" which had appeared at the time of the "market reform" in 1965-1971. This reform to republican and provincial authorities, gave as well as to self-management authorities at different levels, powers which were contradictory to the functioning of unified national market in Yugoslavia.
3. In the 1970s, enterprises were broken up into Basic Organizations of Associated Labour. These are small units, like workshops, which were supposed to be more easily controlled by the workers because of their size, and which had the right to manage the income from the service or product that they produced, as well as to link up (or not) with other units to form larger bodies. International Viewpoint 20 April 1987
The proposed law changes would weaken the power of factory assemblies and other forms of direct democracy (DR)
ments will be to restore the situation of the mid-1960s. By the end of that decade, intellectual and working-class opposition found political support within the party to defeat the proponents of further liberalization of the economy. Today one can see that the events of the 1960s were only the dress rehearsal for a much bigger contest, which is fast approaching.
The important difference is that the forces which triumphed in the 1960s are today in bad shape. After five years of ever-worsening crisis, the state has strengthened its position vis-a-vis the party, while technocratic and bureaucratic layers have increased their weight within the party at the expense of workers. The party, how ever, still retains the loyalty of that crucial segment of the working class: skilled workers in key industrial enterprises. But another year of effective economic stagnation will sorely try this alliance. The government has made the first move, by placing the burden of economic recovery upon the weakest sector of the class: those working in small enterprises, in already depressed branches of the economy (textiles, building and so on) and in public services (such as transport, education and health). These sectors have also produced the most strikes.
International Viewpoint 20 April 1987
The importance of the new legislation should not be underestimated. Nor should it be overestimated: the Yugoslav system is no longer amenable to regulation from above. The current economic crisis expresses a much wider crisis of social relations, which means that it is also beginning to challenge the foundations of the social system itself. Behind today's debates about the market, or about separation of the state from the economy, looms the much larger issue of ownership and control of the means of production. Arguments in favour of an "integral market" - a market allocating not just some goods (as before, but capital and labour too - now litter the Yugoslav press. But proponents of increased economic liberalism will have to count on working-class resistance.
A new force is currently pushing itself onto the industrial scene -represented by the Committees for General People's Defence (GPD, under military control) and Social SelfProtection (SSP, directed by the police). These Committees, increasingly active in industrial disputes and in general surveillance of public life, have come to articulate conservative interests - the policy of the "firm hand" - and are increasingly seen as a threat to basic democracy.
Their current heightened profile reflects not only a hardening of attitudes on law and order in the factories and the neighbourhoods, but also the waning authority of the party - a very much self-inflicted wound. Seized by an enormous and irrational fear of what the economic crisis may bring, the party has basically decided to keep its head down lest its intervention might provoke "a revolution in social relations". (4)
Committees for the GPD and SSP (the two always acting in unison) operate at all levels of the society: from the factories and the neighbour hoods to local government and the republican and federal state bodies (where they are represented in the Social Alliance). Formed much earlier, they were legalized in 1979 by the Eleventh Party Congress, when it was decided that the crisis had come to stay.
They are supposed to be the eyes and ears of the "socialist self managing system" , ever on the lookout for "the enemy within" . They are also meant to take over when, in an emergency situation, the regular government is paralyzed (the 1981 Kosovo demonstrations provided one
4. 'Danas,' Zagreb, December 9, 1986.
9
such occasion).
At the local level, the Committees are composed of the following individuals: the party secretary, the senior trade-union official, the manager, the president of the factory council, the president of the communal assembly, the chief of police and the local military commander. In the words of one of the system's publicists, "in their representative composition they reflect all the accumulated experience and socialpolitical responsibility of each social and working community". (5) Given the frequent turnover of civilian cadres, however, their continuity rests essentially on the territorial army, the civilian defence and the police. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that "this thick web, which covers the whole of the Yugoslav space, is overlaid with a secrecy producing the kind of respect which accompanies all undercover state activity. (6) Coup d'etat against self-management
But it would be wrong to reduce these Committees' ambitions to a mere police-military conspiracy. They have been very useful in enforcing the will of the local state bureaucrat, factory manager, party and trade-union functionary. The law which regulates their activities, for its part, contains a very imprecise definition of what constitutes an emergency situation and has thereby ensured a wide space for their initiatives.
Instances of their activities in the neighbourhoods are rarely brought to public attention, though recently two cases of "big brother" efforts - one in Belgrade and another in Split -have caused some alarm. Committees for GPD and SSP are the first to spring into action when any open conflict erupts between labour and management. On these occasions, all other bodies normally operating in the factories - the workers' council, the manager and his auxilliaries, the party and the trade unions - come under their command.
This coup d'etat against self-management is rarely challenged. However, their intervention is now providing an additional motive for strike action - which is one reason why the liberal wing of the party and the trade union would like to see a clarification of that part of the Law of Associated Labour which deals with labour disputes: Article 638.
A recent article in the Belgrade weekly NIN paints a graphic picture of the role played by the Committees: "One should see what happens when 10 there is a sign, however small, that a strike may be in the offing. Immediately the whole apparatus springs into action, the GPD and SSP take matters into their own hands, directors and politicians are woken at night, marathon meetings and consultations go on for days. It has now become a regular practice that the Committees for GPD and SSP take the lead in ending strikes ...
"When they step onto the scene, then naturally their main activity is hunting down strike leaders, with everything being done to compromise them... what comes under the heading of 'socially unacceptable behaviour' in the rulebook of these committees is so elastic, and its inter pretation is left to so few people, that some justification for this coup d'etat against self-management - this heavy-handed action against what are usually perfectly legitimate strikers demands - can always be found." (7)
The key words here are: "it has now become a regular practice" At one of their recent meetings, the Presidency of the Trade-Union Alliance of Yugoslavia itself complained that "it is not just that these actions of the Committees for GPD and SSP bypass the procedures established by the Law of Associated Labour, but also that the Committees appear in the role of protectors of the existing techno-bureaucratic forces in the working collectives ... Trade-union organizations in the factories, aided by the communal trade-union councils, should be more energetic in contesting the practice of the Committees for GPD and SSP of concentrating all their energy on finding strike leaders and establishing their guilt." (8)
However, since in their own practice the unions have adopted a general policy of passivity in labour conflicts, this recommendation is unlikely to be heeded. Clearly, only legalizing strikes would serve to check the present trend towards the militarization of factories.
The party fears that the legalization of strikes could lead to things getting out of control, so that the
AUSTRIA O Miles 100
HUNGARY
• Ljubljana
SLOVENIA •Zagreb RUMANIA
CROATIA • VOJVODINA BOSNIA & Belgrade HERZEGOVINA JUGOSLAVIA Sarajevo SERBIA BULGARIA N TENEGRO.
### Republic KOSOVO boundary • Skople Autonomous province ALBANIA MACEDONIA boundary 'GREECE proposed changes of the Socialist Youth Alliance of Slovenia in favour of this measure are unlikely to be accepted. The right to strike would not only strengthen the position of workers against management, it would also introduce a whole new element in the relationship between the state and the economy. Trying to have their cake and eat it
Judging by press reports, the government is in fact planning to reinforce the position of management in the factories at the expense of institutions of direct democracy. This will make strikes more "illegal" without actually checking them. Consequently, the interventions of the Committees for GPD and SSP are likely to increase.
It is indeed ironic that the Yugoslav leadership, while recommending that market forces should be encour aged, should at the same time be committed to the notion that the right to strike is "capitalist" . It is very much a case of trying to have their cake and eat it. For the workers, however, self-organization and strike action remain essential means of self-protection both against "technobureaucratic forces", but also against policies that have less and less to do with socialism.
In August 1986, a survey among 672 workers from all over Yugoslavia showed that a majority saw self-management as a system that did not represent their interests. Their views varied according to qualification. Among unqualified workers 51 per cent showed a "negative attitude" to self-management, while the opposite was true of 57 per cent of highly skilled workers. Two-thirds felt that they had no influence on decisions made in their enterprises. The same number declared that they had no respect for their workers' council delegates, because they did not speak on their behalf. In fact, more than half believed that self-managing organs expressed the interests of managers and the technical intelligentsia. Nevertheless, breaches of self-management rights and procedures are one of the most common reasons given by workers for going on strike.
At the same time, research and public-opinion polls show that the League of Communists of Yugoslavia
Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. 'NIN', Belgrade, October 19, 1986.
8. 8. Ibid. Ibid. International Viewpoint 20 April 1987
### Yugoslavia's economic crisis
THE YUGOSLAV economy today is squeezed in the powerful vice of huge external and internal indebtedness. There is a 20 billion US dollar foreign debt, on which the period of deferred payment expires this year. The internal debt is close to the same figure. In the first six months of last year, bank losses (including that of the National Bank of Yugoslavia) were estimated at 12 billion dollars. Losses in the economy and currently unpaid bills amoun. ted to another 3 billion dollars.
Halfway through 1986, three of the most underdeveloped federal units -Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro - declared themselves bankrupt, to the tune of 5 billion dollars (a sum equal to the whole net income of the country that year). Their bank vaults empty, they cannot maintain their budgetary obligations or pay interest on their share of the country's foreign debts. At present, the social sector as a whole is unable to cover the needs of even minimal reinvestment -.. the socially-owned means of production are in danger of simply melting away.
A corollary of this situation has been a massive growth of unemployment. By autumn 1986, even the official (highly unreliable) figure had shot beyond the one million mark. Most of the unemployed are young people: 78% are under the age of thirty, and the vast majority have never had a job. Thus a whole generation is turning into surplus labour.
The number of unemployed is being swelled also by an accelerating exodus from the countryside, by an increasing number of housewives seeking work and by return of some of the 600,000 Yugoslavs working abroad, themselves the victims of growing unemployment in Western Europe. A further million people either work part-time or are underemployed.
For the government over the past nine months, the question has been not so much whether to intervene but how much to intervene in the economy. 1986 was a year of state elections and the Thirteenth Party Congress so it had been necessary in the early part of the year to provide at least the appearance of economic revival. Lower interest rates, an increased money supply and an overvalued dinar combined to boost internal consumption and push up real incomes by 10% - after several years of continuous decline. Inflation rose to over 100%. To check the growth of wages, one of the first acts of the new government was to introduce a new law on incomes and wages, which obliged the enterprises to increase their capital reserve funds at the expense of wages.
Official statistics paint a very gloomy picture of the living standards of the Yugoslav workers. In Croatia, one of the richest republics, an estimated 30% of workers live below the official poverty line and another 30% just above it. Some 40% of workers are therefore forced to take a second job, giving rise to a bloated grey economy - which, though in the short run it has cushioned the effects of the rapid fall in the industrial wage, has also made the economy virtually unmanageable.
According to official figures, the average monthly wage in mid-1986 was 66,753 dinars (about 150 US dollars). This average, however, spans great differences in actual income -. with most people earning considerably less. A Belgrade marketing firm recently calculated that an ordinary four-member family needs 67,504 dinars per month just to buy basic food. The tradeunions' own calculations have produced a similar figure. According to the federal trade-union council, despite the 10% rise in real income, many workers do not earn enough at their place of work to keep their families alive. Increased social differentiation, they have said, is reflected in the fact that food and basic commodities are steadily falling as a proportion of the national consumption, while luxury and expensive goods are rising. These days, the trade unions complain, workers are having to take their children out of nursery schools because they no longer afford them.
Low wages and difficult living conditions in general (shortage and poor quality of housing, for example) have provided the most immediate motive for the 383 strikes which took place in Yugoslavia in the first six months of 1986 (42 up on the year before), involving 40,000 workers (53% more than in 1985.) The largest number of strikes occurred in small enterprises (with fewer than 100 workers), while only 3 involved more than 1,000 employees. Thus, in fact, only a tiny part of the 9.5 million wage-earners struck last year From these figures one could deduce that the Yugoslav leadership has little to worry about. But this is certainly not its own judgement: strikes and their regulation have become one of the main issues of the day.
years the party has lost over 10,000 members - the largest drop on record - most of them workers and students. Indeed, there have never been so few workers in the LCY.
So how are we to explain this apparent paradox between rejection and commitment which characterizes the attitude of Yugoslav workers to self-management and the party? One explanation would be that it ex. presses the central conflict between the workers' needs and aspirations and the visible inability of their established institutions to fulfill them. Yugoslavia, in other words, is now in a political vacuum - the ancien regime is still there but no longer functions, while the new order remains to be born.
The Slovene Youth organization, the SYAS, has chartered out one path from the old to the new. However, this does not mean that the Slovene paradigm could be repeated elsewhere - it will most likely remain a uniquely Slovene phenomenon. It is also possible that - crushed between the pressure from below and containment from above - the SYAS reforming crusade will come to a stop. The SYAS will need all its courage and stamina to keep to its chosen line of march.
It is very important that it does so. The significance of the SYAS actions lie not only in what they are meant to achieve, but also in the fact that they have called the bureaucratic bluff regarding the assumed limita. tions on what can be done without prior blessing of the party leadership.
SYAS has been capable of independent action because it has support among Slovene youth; and it has won this support because it stopped being a bureaucratic institution and opened itself to new ideas and movements. In doing so it has placed a mirror in front of the LCY. Already there are calls from among the party intelligentsia outside Slovenia for a new "historic bloc" of all progressive forces, which would include also the so-called alternative movements, to lead the process of necessary political reconstruction. Regroupment inside the party along these lines would produce a political climate quite different from the current depressing spectacle of bureaucratic bickering -often with nationalist overtones -along republican/provincial axes.
The basic message of the SYAS has been that all issues should be opened to public and democratic debate. It remains to be seen to what extent its latest initiative - for legalization of strikes - will achieve this. It remains also to be seen whether the SYAS will take this debate into the factories, where it properly belongs.
11
(LCY) retains considerable support in the working class, especially among skilled and highly skilled workers. (This has led certain Yugoslav sociologists to argue that the country's workers are still at the stage of being
International Viewpoint 20 April 1987 mere "labour" - that they have not yet consituted themselves as a class.) Yet this apparent loyalty to the party is contradicted by the fact that workers are leaving the party in ever increasing numbers. In the last two