"The leadership is incompetent, if not outright corrupt" AFTER A 33-day long strike, one of the longest in Yugoslavia since 1945, 1,500 miners in Labin in the Republic of Croatia returned to work on May 11, claiming a partial victory. The strike followed the Yugoslav parliament's adoption of a law freezing wages on February 27, provoking a wave of strikes. (See IV 118, April 20, 1987.)
Only one of the miners' demands concerned wages. Their other demands were around living and working conditions.
This unprecedented strike has had a deep impact, especially in Croatia. In March, the leadership of the unions and the party in that republic had already condemned the wage freeze. And the Trade-Union Alliance of Croatia took a more ambiguous attitude during the strike than the local unions.
The media reported the strike extensively. There was a roundtable on TV on the strikes in Yugoslavia, of which, according to the official figures, there were 380 between January and May, involving 50,000 workers. The press also published a series of articles, including the following one. It is a feature by the journalist Mila Stula, which was
Danas. MILA STULA
E DEMAND a 100 per cent
W wage increase, we demand the replacement of managers whom we do not trust, we demand that we be granted housing loans on the same terms as other workers — these are the demands of the workers of the Istra Mines Rasa, whose long-lasting strike has provoked great interest among the Yugoslav public.
They say that they will not return to work until their demands are met. It is estimated that each strike day costs several billions of [old] dinars. However, according to Mujo Kasumovic, a skilled worker from the Tupljak pit, they are ready to work Saturdays and Sundays to make up the losses.
The miners say that their trade union has deserted them. We searched in vain for Refik Radimic, the mine's trade-union president. He was nowhere to be found. We were unable to speak either with the president of the Labin Comof Croatia's main magazine, mune, Sergije Baskijeri, or with the president of the Commune's LCY [League of Yugoslav Communists] committee, Vlado Cekad, or with its secretary, Veljko Gole.
Instead, the journalists were directed to speak with the president of the Commune's trade-union council, Antek Uksic, and the Rasa director, Egidije Milevoj. At the press conference, they warned us to "be careful with whom you speak and how you use your material". Apparently, we could not trust just anybody. It is also very clear that the miners, for their part, do not trust the trade union, and even less the general director, whose resignation they have been unsuccessfully demanding.
For the time being, however, the technical director of the Labin Basic Organization of Associated Labour (BOAL), Matija Lisica, and its administrative secretary, Duro Tosic, have been suspended [at the miners' insistence] published in the April 21 issue
from their posts.
"We have had enough of Engineer Lisica. On the first day of the strike, he came to see us in his new Volvo, which must have cost more than one and a half billion old dinars, whereas we do not have enough to eat. We have to borrow from trade-union funds in order to buy textbooks and clothes for our children" , says Hasan Velagic, a miner.
### Lies about miner's sabotage
Stories have started to circulate lately that the miners want to flood the mine.
"This is a barefaced lie", insists Ivica Stjepanovic, a miner. "Why should we want to flood something on which our livelihood depends? The mine is our bread. We are looking after the situation in the mine, and will not allow anything to happen to it."
However, we were told by Silvije Berkaric, director of the Labin BOAL - a man whom workers describe as a "real communist" and as the only man they can trust - that "despite their intention to safeguard the mines, their safety is being endangered. We have tried to send down a team to make the pits safe, but it was stopped. There is a real danger that a disaster will happen, unless we continue to safeguard the walls."
The miners are nevertheless refusing to return to work. They are waiting for the republic [Croatian] leadership. They want somebody from the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia, the Economic Chamber of Croatia, from the Federal Executive Council [the government].
They say that Branko Jurlina from the Council of the Trade-Union Alliance of Croatia (CTUAC) came to speak to them, but that he told them "nothing new. We know all that already". '. They believe that only a discussion with these high functionaries will bring a change. Here they are mistaken because if there is no money, neither the republic leadership nor the government, from whom the miners are expecting help, can create it.
The leadership of the Labin Commune and the mine do not seem to understand that the miners are not hired labourers and that, if they are not given land for building houses and flats, or at least symbolic compensation for them in Labin, they will simply build houses in Bosnia, since they are largely Bosnian.
"Yugoslavia is here as well as there," says Karajkovic. "I would much rather see my sons living in Labin than elsewhere, because here they would have a better future. But what can I do when even I have nowhere to go?"
Ahmet Murtic was pensioned three years ago. He has nowhere to live. "When I was about to be pensioned, l was the fifth on the housing list. But now my name is no longer on it: they say that pensioners cannot be placed on that list. When I go to the Commune housing department, they tell me to go and see the director. The director sends me to the trade union, and they send me somewhere else. So, I am given the runaround, and nowhere do they ask me who I am, nor wish me as much as good day. You know, at times I feel like crying. And yet I worked for 30 years shoulder to shoulder with these people. I have been a member of the party since 1957. But nobody asks now if I need help".
In the years immediately after the war, the mining profession was highly regarded and valued. Miners' wages were among the highest, and their standard of living was satisfactory. This was achieved despite the difficult conditions of generalized want, of reconstruction and building of the country.
However, over the past two decades,
Poster published by the Socialist
Youth
Alliance of
Slovenia in their weekly paper, Mladina
("Youth").
The slogan at the side reads "Repression in
Socialism"
REPRESHJA V SOCIALIZMIH
YUGOSLAVIA through no fault of their own, the miners find themselves in the backwater of social and economic life. "That which has once been lost has been difficult to recover. Mines have been left without their best miners, modernization of pits is proceeding slowly, the coal is being mined in the same way as 50 years ago. In a majority of the mines, the technology is old, the machinery, ancient and worn out. The mines have no money with which to buy new machinery", wrote the [trade-union] paper Rad a few years ago.
On the occasion of the celebration of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Labin Republic and of the Prostina Revolt, on 1 May 1971, Comrade Tito said at a public meeting in Labin: "Naturally, we have discussed at great length the state of the economy. Prices are rising, and nobody seems to care about money. Many are behaving in a irresponsible manner towards our community. We continue to have grandiose investment plans. In a word, there is too much anarchy, and this leads to deviations and crises: We have agreed that we should ADIN June 29, 1987 • International Viewpoint
YUGOSLAVIA no longer allow investment without proper financial backing. I will not ask anybody here to save money. Who can I ask here to save? The worker who does not have enough for everyday needs?
"I call instead upon the people who are today in responsible positions in our industry, our banks and in other sectors of our economic life - most of whom are Communists - to behave not according to their own wishes but according to the decisions of the League of Communists".
There are many in Labin who recall Tito's speech today. But they also speak of something else. The miners say: "Everybody here celebrates Miners' Day. It has become the Commune's official holiday. Yet we, who really ought to celebrate, eat sausages with beans on that day, while at the same time leaders - whom we never see at the mines— celebrate in Rabac [the nearby tourist resort]". And there is a good deal of truth in these words.
For how are we to explain otherwise the deep mistrust that exists between the management of Istra Mines and the Commune leadership on the one hand and the miners on the other? They do not think much of each other. The leadership says that the miners do not take into account the problems that the society faces today, whereas the miners believe that the leadership is incompetent, if not outright corrupt. Therefore, this "unprecedented" strike is continuing.
Where are we to look for its causes? Some say that the main villain is the Intervention Law, which has directly affected the miners' pockets. But the essence of the strike causes go much deeper.
The Labin leadership today prefers to forget the last year's strike, when the miners wanted first of all to discuss the bad organization of work and absence of plans for the future, and only afterwards sought a 60 per cent wage increase. At that time, the miners also asked that some managers be replaced.
Undermining worker's self- management
The day after they had won their wage increase, they were visited by the president of the CTUAC, Ivo Bilandzija; but no improvement in living standards and working conditions followed. No answers were given to the stagnation 1 of the Istra Mines, failed investment in the Ripenda and Koromacno pits, the lack of coal in the Labin pit, the money that disappeared, nobody knows 0 where. Yet all this has seriously affected the material, social situation and, indeed, the self-managing status of the workers. International Viewpoint o June 29, 1987
"They say that we get 17-18 million [old] dinars, but here is my pay slip, which shows that my average for the past three months has been 10,759,000!" says miner Zijad Barjektarevic. The miners say that there is a lot of demagogy about their wage levels. It is true that sometimes they can earn as much as 20 million old dinars, but only if they work Saturdays and Sundays without a break. And the work is made much harder by the fact that they have nowhere to rest after their work.
We visited the so-called single men's hostel, which the mine managers and Commune leadership speak of with pride. Its inhabitants, on the other hand, call it, justifiably, "the Grey House." It looks like a paupers' ghetto, something that we never dreamt we could find in Yugoslavia 40 years after the war.
On the ceiling of the dining area are "paintings" made by the faulty sanitary system on the floor above. There is little or no heating. The iron beds are reminiscent of a prison. There are two or three wooden chairs made before the war or soon after. Running from wall to wall are washing lines. There, then, the tired miners are supposed to find their well-earned rest.
«We simply have nothing"
Miner Hasan Karajkovic says: "Our youth drink and play cards because there is no money even for a table tennis set, which is the cheapest form of recreation. We simply have nothing. I do not want to be rich, but I do want to live like a human being."
Hadzib Pestalic, a disabled miner, says: "We are here only to labour, and we have a value only while we work — nobody cares about us as human beings"
Time runs on, the pits are empty, problems are growing, and nerves are being strained. A small incident can start a fire. Everybody is aware of this. The Labin miners say that they will not allow any manipulation with their strike. They will not allow anybody to proclaim them the enemies of society, for which "we are ready to give our lives at any time, if necessary". But they assure us also that "We shall fight on, as we know and can, to win what we have earned by our hard work". Despite a degree of naïveté, a touch of unnecessary eagerness perhaps, they need to be understood. They are largely young men, men in their twenties, living far from their families and almost completely isolated.
The Labin leadership and managers are, on the whole, local old-timers, well-to-do people, engineers, professors and such like. The miners are newcomers, temporary workers, virtually uninvolved in the life of the town, unskilled or semi-skilled workers, who often do not know about their rights under self-management or how to use them. How is this to be overcome? By using the organs of self-management, the party and the trade unions?
For years now, these organs have placidly watched the same people rotate from one function to another: the manager of the mine becoming the president of the Commune, the comrade from the party committee turning up as the mine's manager, and so on. Some have become richer, some poorer — and all the while the miners' lives have remained unchanged. Trade union behaves as an
"organ of the authorities"
During these days of the strike, the Commune's party committee prefers to busy itself discussing the journalists' reports in the local paper, The Labin Commune, instead of discussing the lessons to be drawn from last year's strike, or how to change their style of work.
The trade union has remained equally uninvolved: it behaves not as an association of workers, but as an organ of the authorities. It is possible to argue that the workers' demands, or the methods that have been chosen to achieve them, may not be right, but the job of the trade union is to be among them -not outside them - in order to find better alternatives. It is simply not enough for trade unions to limit themselves to distributing loans for winter food or for clothes.
Last Friday, the presidency of the CTUAC issued a statement in which it said, "it is inappropriate for the republic [trade-union] leadership to intervene with positions and promises about increases in personal incomes in this or any other case. We support all the actions so far undertaken by the organs and organizations of the Labin Commune and of the Rijeka Association of Communes....
"At the same time, we call on the Labin trade-union council and the InterCommunal Trade-Union Alliance of Rijeka to prepare, together with the representative of the Republic's trade-union committee for energy and the Presiding Committee of the CTUAC, a complete analysis, with proposals for solving the question of individual house-building loans, employees' accommodation, food and other vital needs. This analysis should be ready for 15 May".
So much for the trade union. The miners will be considering in the coming days what to do next.