Are There Workers in Montenegro?

Officially in Montenegro there are 80 thousand workers who on the average earn 181 German marks a month. How many of them can live off their salaries.

AIM Podgorica, 28 May, 2000

By a casual observer Montenegrin workers can be divided into at least five groups: workers who work in their factories; workers who spend time in factories and think that they are working if they appear at work every morning, but in fact they are weighing which will happen first: will they retire or will the factory go bankrupt before that; workers who are stimulated by their bosses to work in order to survive until the arrival of interested foreign partners; the fourth group are former workers who have seen how the land lies in the years of denouement and founded private firms, and along with selling fuel in the street or some other additional deal, ensured a comparatively decent future for themselves; and the fifth group - workers who were not lucky like their colleagues, but are formally (and fictitiously) employed in one of the former industrial giants, but are in fact selling cigarettes in the streets, changing foreign currency in the black market, or trying to make some money by driving a taxi in cars bought during more fortunate times.

As opposed to the standard of living at the time of Ante Markovic and the former self-managing socialism when 150 thousand workers worked for an average salary ranging between one thousand German marks and the price of a 'Ficha' (Fiat 600, which used to be the 'national vehicle' in former Yugoslavia), nowadays a worker in this Republic takes home on the average 181 German mark while living expenses for a family of four are three to four times higher. This does not include hygiene, clothing and footwear. A part of the workers have just found out that their pension insurance has not been paid for several years back.

However, although in the past ten years, the workers were first pushed to be the shock troops in overturning the former regime, and then about 50 thousand of them lost their jobs, there has never been a social strike of the workers in Montenegro, although there was plenty of reasons for that. Srdja Kekovic, leader of Podgorica trade union, explains this phenomenon as follows: "When you are called up to go to war, when you have a political turmoil which threatens to lead to fratricidal war, when you have sanctions imposed on you from all sides and when bombs are falling on you, these are extremely difficult conditions even for a trade union to organise any strike of this kind, least of all for the workers to do it on their own". That the workers are still in a state of emergency is in a way illustrated by observing of 1 May - the holiday of all the workers and trade union solidarity, when it was clearly said that "we are not celebrating, we are just observing it".

Not even this could pass without political reactions, and pro-Milosevic's Socialist People's Party (SNP) complained: "how come there was no (traditional) early-morning picnic on 1 may", which was commented on by one of unnamed trade unionist: "and had we celebrated 1 may, SNP would have asked 'why are you celebrating?'". Like in the whole former Yugoslavia, in Montenegro the trade union is thought of as a group of people who sometimes distribute meat... when there is any. However, according to the words of Srdja Kekovic, Montenegrin trade union developed into a respectable organisation which is recognised in the world of trade unions and which negotiates with the government of the Republic about the problems of the workers.

Kekovic warns, however, that the period of transition has more serious demands in the best Balkan tradition: "We are nowadays concerned whether privatisation will be transparent, whether we will remove certain deviations, we are trying to save the firm from bankruptcy, we act as management, we assume the social role, and least of all we deal with our main activities - struggle for salaries, better working conditions, protection at work and the highest possible standard of living".

Out of 80 thousand workers slightly less than one third in Montenegro receive salaries with a delay of six months, which varies from month to month. Minister of labour and social welfare in the government of Montenegro Predrag Drecun claims that the government has great problems with these payments and that it would not have been able to cope with them on its own, without the help of the European Union and the USA. "Depending on the years of service, our ministry is obliged to pay for a period of time a compensation to the workers whose company is bankrupt. There are between five and eight thousand such workers in Montenegro, and unfortunately, the number of bankruptcies is such that it dictates this figure", says minister Drecun.

This brings us to the workers who were first engaged in removing the former administration from office, and then were on paid leave in shifts of a few months which they spent in the battlefield around Dubrovnik, later they passed their working hours at work in debates about whether they should support Milo (Djukanovic) or Momir (Bulatovic) and finally, when there was no reason to go to work, nobody needed them any more, and they started on their own the "business" of exchanging foreign currency in the streets, selling cigarettes or similar.

One of them is a man of about sixty, dressed in military khaki waistcoat, with two crates in front of him and cigarettes boxes on them which he is selling in front of Crna Gora Hotel. He used to be a worker of the greatest machine-building "Radoje Dakic" factory in Podgorica which nowadays has nothing but empty workshops left. The ruin of this factory will be remembered in the future as a good example of the effects of the disintegration processes of the nineties. Our interlocutor - who nevertheless does not wish his name mentioned in the media - recalls: "We worked with all our might at the time, more than three thousand workers were happy, we could compete with Britain or Japan in production of excavators. As you can see, nowadays everything is still over there, 'Dakic' has practically died but it has not been buried, and soon one day even that will happen, too. When transformation was completed, more than three thousand workers were immediately sent on paid leave and many have never returned, nor ever will". And to the question whether the destiny of "Dakic" might have been feigned by the management that replaced the former administration with the help of the same workers, our interlocutor says that he believes that this is very possible because the workers of this factory had the opportunity to change a lot, since even after the so-called anti-bureaucratic coup, there was always a threat of a new protest from there. To the question whether he would abandon selling cigarettes and go back to the factory if he would be called back, he says: "Unfortunately, I will never be called back, because I personally think that 'Dakic' will never work like it used to for several reasons - machines were destroyed, workshops were destroyed, measuring instruments were destroyed, everything that was not stolen was destroyed, so there is no sense even talking about it".

After 27 years of working experience in "Dakic", from the post of a process control technologist, Marko Ralevic sat into his car and became a taxi driver. “I have three children, my wife is unemployed, I am disabled, I was left without my job and without my apartment, they paid my pension insurance until '92. I went to court with 'Dakic' because of the apartment, but in the meantime they sold it, and since I won the law-suit they must build a new one for me. My salary once used to be two and a half thousand marks, and I did not leave 'Dakic' then because I expected that as a disabled worker I would get an apartment, so here I am”

These are just a few examples of personal destinies of a large number of former workers in the true sense of the word who are nowadays, instead of being retired, surviving by working in the streets even when the strongest northern wind is blowing in Podgorica, paying for their naivety and the fact that they were unprepared for big political games.

The destiny of all the workers In Montenegro is now linked to the biggest political question, the state status of Montenegro, that is, to the relation between Montenegro and Serbia. “That is why at this moment Montenegro is suffering under three types of sanctions, those of the international community which are formally still in force because the world money is not accessible to us, the sanctions imposed by Serbia which are reflected in this inexplicable blockade of commodity exchange and payment operations, as well as the sanctions of internal forces which support Belgrade regime”, says minister Predrag Drecun.

Nobody, including the Montenegrin state leadership, knows what the way out of this situation is and what it will be like.

Srdjan Jankovic

(AIM)