Wave Of Walk-Outs, Strikes May Flood Country Soon

The state enterprises employees are likely to start protesting first.

A threat of walk-outs and strikes at the state enterprises may emerge in the country soon. The secret strings of such events don’t lie in the workers’ moods, but rather in the growing tension between the republican level of administration and the directors of the state enterprises, as well as between the authorities and the potential buyers of state assets.

A considerable share of the state sector remains one of the peculiarities of the Belarusian economy. The state enterprises which have no internal motivation to increase the efficiency of manufacture, keep afloat due to financial support from the above. Easy-term loans and taxation, free budget subsidies, cut down prices for energy commodities and other forms of support allow such enterprises to keep and even increase the manufacturing scopes despite the low competitiveness.

Chief executive officers of the state enterprises, just like in the Soviet times, are trying to fetch as many preferences as possible, from the upper governing level. Previously it was an overall trading in all the resources, material and financial, but now it looks rather like an administrative trade in financial instruments. Powerful CEOs at top positions at big and important enterprises complain or blackmail the authorities when they enter superior officials’ offices in order to fetch some budget assets.

Walk-outs and strikes threat remains one of blackmailing instruments. The authorities dread rebellions and mass protests of enraged proletarians. The experience of “perestroika” and “glasnost” demonstrates where such protests can lead to. The social protest movements, sanctioned back then by the “red” directors and local nomenclatures, crashed down the enormous Soviet hierarchic structure of administration and eventually led to the collapse of the country.

Current Belarusian CEOs, of course, have no such far-reaching aims. For them, it is important to stay fed by the state, to receive financial preferences, and to achieve that, they may fall back on certain threats, which remain an object of trade with its price. Selling of a strike threat at a big enterprise with dozens of thousands employees may affect the authorities, and the enterprise will be granted additional financial resources to prevent the possible workers’ disturbances.

In the situation of cutting down the financial inflows, the contradiction between the republican level of administration and the directors of the state enterprises under subsidies is considerably escalating. Earlier, the authorities managed to solve the problems of such ineffective enterprises with a significant external financial support, but today they may use other instruments instead of patronage: repressions against CEOs, if the authorities do not dare to privatize the enterprises, and selling of the state assets, if they give a green light to privatization in this sector.

However, given that the green light is on, the authorities will face more challenges on this way. They will come across the buyers of the state assets, who act in a brutal marketing manner and have no romantic illusions. Both foreign and domestic investors are interested in minimizing of prices for the privatized enterprises. Moreover, one and the same enterprise may cost millions of dollars and be bought for nothing as a result of bankruptcy. Our followers of Koreiko know perfectly well how to drive an enterprise to bankruptcy.

Such pre-selling “preparation” of privatized state enterprises from the side of potential investors can be conducted also by organizing mass protests of workers. Walk-outs and strikes mean extra expenses in the price of non-competitive production, which lead to devaluation of manufacture and the enterprise’s bankruptcy.

At the background of the deepening economic crisis, lack of financial resources for the state sector and forced privatization of big enterprises, the processes that are roiling under the surface within the plant buildings, top offices and expensive restaurants by now, may flood the streets and squares in the form of strikes, walk-outs, rebellions and manifestations. In the current geopolitical conditions such destabilization may create additional threats to the Belarusian authorities and the citizens of the country.

Liudmila Hraznova, ucpb.org