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   Vol.66/No.30           August 12, 2002  
 
 
Workers protest layoffs
in Eastern Europe
 
BY PATRICK O’NEILL  
A number of factory occupations and other actions by workers in Eastern Europe have jolted plans by capitalist investors from Western Europe and North America to carry through widespread layoffs.

The Wall Street Journal noted this "snag" in investors’ paths with some alarm in a June 28 article entitled "In Eastern Europe, Workers Go Sour on Foreign Owners." The big business daily reported, "Across Eastern Europe, a workers’ revolt is threatening the continuing sale of old state enterprises."

The Journal continued, "More than a decade of economic reforms and industrial restructuring has given workers a taste for a better life, but a bellyful of the free market’s downside: layoffs, production targets and profitability goals, sometimes with scant unemployment benefits. Tired of smartly dressed foreign investors spouting buzzwords and grand plans that often boil down to job cuts, workers are turning against privatization, sometimes with violence."

The paper cited examples from the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. In the latter country, 5,000 state railway workers stormed the capital in 2001 to stop proposals to privatize the rail system. In Romania, steelworkers at a recently privatized mill threw chairs at the U.S.-based manager, and locked him in a canteen after he proposed layoffs.

Rebellions have tended to break out as job guarantees of two to five years offered by the new private investors have begun to expire, and the capitalists have attempted to slash workforces and institute other cutbacks.

The Journal also pointed to the weak position of the "pro-market" governments that typically rule these countries. "Governments are reluctant to side with investors," it wrote, in part because they "need the workers’ votes...to win coming referendums on joining the European Union."
 
 
Related articles:
Russian Duma debates allowing sale of land  
 
 
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