BELARUS: A NATION ON A CONTRACTUAL LEASH

text / Alexander Ivanov
translation / Mark Slay
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A RESERVE OF SOCIALISM?
Belarus is one of the 15 republics that were part of the USSR. After gaining its independence in 1991 following the breakup of the Soviet Union, for four years Belarus successfully moved forward on the path to reform. The Constitution, adopted in 1994, received the highest marks from experts in international law for its democratic approach and its unqualified adherence to the principle of the division of powers. The country of ten million inhabitants, which had one of the highest concentrations of nuclear weapons in the world, voluntarily gave up those weapons and declared itself a non-nuclear state. As part of the USSR, Belarus had played the role of an "assembly shop" with a large number of highly trained specialists in many industries. Despite the economic crisis following the break up of the USSR, for a long time Belarus remained a country with high economic, industrial and intellectual potential for development.

Unfortunately, much changed after 1994, when Alexander Lukashenko came to power. Since this time, Lukashenko has continued to occupy the post of President of the Republic of Belarus, despite his term of office expiring long ago. The most recent elections in March 2006 were sharply criticized by  international observers, and pictures of violence directed against peaceful citizens who took to the streets to protest the many falsifications of the elections were seen around the world.

In such a situation, a society inevitably encounters the problem of the free expression of its will, and independent institutions are subjected to pressure by the authorities. Belarus is no exception: independent political parties, human rights organizations and labour unions which clash with the authorities have been subjected to pressure and persecution. In 2000, two unions affiliated to the IMF lodged a complaint with the International Labor Organisation (ILO) against the numerous illegal acts of the authorities against Belarusian unions. Since then, IMF has been following the situation in the country. What has changed during that time and what is the situation today in Belarus, the country with the unenviable reputation of being the last bastion of dictatorship in Europe?

The Belarusian authorities have chosen the Stalinist principle of solving problems: if you have a person, you have a problem; no person, no problem. While the regime could not afford to fully repeat the experience of the Stalinist repressions an attempt was made, as a result of which rumors of the existence of "death squads" in Belarus were reported around the world, and the disappearances
of certain politicians remain unsolved. Lukashenko also silences Belarusians by other means. The authorities have consistently destroyed independent organizations in Belarus. And, to keep people quiet, decided to tie their hands with short-term employment contracts. In 1999, a decree was issued transferring certain categories of workers to short-term contracts; at the time the practice did not become widespread due to the resistance of the relatively independent Belarusian Federation of Trade Unions. But after Lukashenko's deputy chief of administration became the leader of the Federation in formal elections, the unions retreated, and beginning in 2003 the entire country was rapidly put on one to two year contracts. Workers, engineers, doctors and white collar workers received notice from their employers that they had to conclude contracts with them for one to two years.

DEEP IN THE HEART OF BELARUS
Tatiana Sologubik lives and works in Brest, a provincial administrative center with a population of 300,000 in south-western Belarus. Although it was late January, the weather was unseasonably warm, with scattered patches of snow, and here and there some puddles of water .

Nevertheless, the cold, damp weather was not conducive to talking on the street, so we met Tatiana over a cup of tea. Tatiana is a union organizer for REPAM, a "leader of the workforce", as her colleagues respectfully call her. She works with 20 people in the printed circuit board shop of the Tsvetotron plant, where 10 are members of REPAM .

Tatiana has been working at the plant for 20 years. It used to be a young enterprise (this year it will celebrate its 25th anniversary) with a promising future, and attracted people from other plants in the city. In Soviet times every worker at the plant would receive a free apartment relatively quickly, as the enterprise built such apartments for them .

The system of issuing free housing disappeared along with the Soviet Union. Now everything has to be paid for .

By the time we met at noon, Tatiana's shift had already ended, and as it transpired, for several years the whole plant had been working on only one shift. Of the 3,000 people working at the plant in Soviet times, only 300 are left. Wages at the plant are based on piece-work: the more you produce, the more you receive, and the wage scales, like the equipment, are ten years old and out of date. In order to at least partially compensate for the low wages, when calculating pay an increase coefficient is used at the enterprise. The coefficient varies depending on how well the enterprise has performed during the given month. If the plant has earned more, then the coefficient is lower; in the opposite case, it is higher. Tatiana's highest monthly wage over the last year was 360,000 rubles (US$170) .

Virtually no new employees are hired, and those who have remained at the plant have been put on one-year contracts. Tatiana resisted the practice for a long time and found reasons not to sign, until she was the last employee who had not signed a contract. But a year ago she was informed that since she was not on a contract, they would not pay her the increase coefficient. In practice that meant a serious cut in an already low wage, and so she gave in .

Tatiana's contract expires at the end of March, and for the time being no one has offered her a new one. There are virtually no young people at the Tsvetotron plant, according to Tatiana the workers are 40 years and older .

Wages are low, and the work is unhealthy by nature, hence young people are not attracted to the work. In view of the unhealthy conditions of production, Tatiana as a circuit board printer can retire at the age of 50. The retirement age in Belarus is 55 for women and 60 for men. But making ends meet on a pension with today's prices is very difficult. There are already working retirees at the plant .

The workers know they are working in unhealthy conditions, but they "show understanding" for the ailing enterprise and they are glad to have a job and a wage at all. In addition to early retirement for unhealthy working conditions, workers are also given milk. Tatiana does not believe in its healing powers and considers that she has already worked long enough under unhealthy conditions .

She wants to change her job, and does not conceal the fact that there is nothing more to keep her at the plant .

The union tried to fight with the administration at the plant with little success. The most serious way in which the workers could protest was simply to quit. But quitting is no solution, and while Tatiana herself has not yet tried to quit, she hopes to find another job by the time her contract expires .

In Belarus Tatiana's situation is by no means uncommon, many workers are confronted with a similar problem. If an employer concludes a contract with you, it is very difficult to leave by mutual agreement before the expiration of the contract. In practice, it is always possible to simply stop showing up for work, and sooner or later you will be fired for absenteeism, but your employment booklet will have an unfavourable entry which will not go unnoticed by your next potential employer .

REPAM is not the only union at Tsvetotron. But when it comes to protecting the rights of a specific individual, people do not want to go to the second union. It does offer consultations, but from a jurist who is employed by the enterprise administration and depends on the director .

"A consultation with a city jurist costs 80,000 rubles (about US$40), and not everyone can afford to pay a third of their monthly wage for one consultation," explains Vasily Zhirnov, the REPAM union committee chairman at the Tsvetotron plant. REPAM offers consultations to its members free of charge .

"At our plant the contract is primarily used to exert psychological pressure," says Vasily. "Most of the workers at our plant are women, and in the present situation, if you're a woman and you're past 40, you won't find another job because no one will hire you. For that reason, if a contract is signed, a woman will not try to get anything better than the contract, even if her pay is only 80,000 a month, she will hold on to that job. That is why the contract keeps people from leaving."

A VERTICAL SYSTEM OF AUTHORITY
 Tsvetotron is like many other enterprises of Belarus, but to get the full picture we went to Minsk, the capital city of Belarus. At the very outset of our conversation, Vladimir Karpukhin, the chairman of the primary union organization of REPAM at the Minsk Automobile Plant, immediately apologized for not being able to give us any information on REPAM members at the plant: "I can't give you any names -- the people are operating virtually underground." Vladimir is 59, and has not been dismissed because of his age: his next annual contract expires on his 60th birthday, and all indications are that he will not be offered another one. "They can't fire my deputy because he has already worked more than 25 years at the plant. If it weren't for that, he and I would have been removed a long time ago.

It doesn't matter that as a specialist I'm on good terms with management, they're also under pressure from above, from the Ministry, where people also work "against their will", they are also under contract. Basically, this is vertical authority in action," Vladimir laughs.

Vertical authority is the system of state authority built up by Lukashenko during his term in office. Essentially, all the changes in this system have been aimed at achieving one goal: concentrating power in the hands of one man, while at the same time removing any dissidence from the structures of authority. Constitutional Court judges, leading officials in the regions who were previously elected, all of them are now appointed or removed from the top down, vertically, by the President of Belarus, and sometimes they even end up in the defendants' dock.

Wages at the MAZ (Minsk Auto Plant) are among the highest in the country. For that reason people value jobs at the MAZ and are afraid of losing them. However, in the molding shop, where in addition to Vladimir some 300 people are employed, turnover is fairly high at 25 to 30 per cent. The tough working conditions are the reason.

There is another union at the plant, one that in other countries would be called a "yellow" or "pocket" union.

As Vladimir notes, "It is an organization whose entire purpose boils down to collecting funds. It's a state racket created to extract a certain sum, one per cent, from the workers, and nothing more. If a worker doesn't want to pay or be a member of that union, he is given to understand that renewal of his contract may pose a problem. " "People have been atomized," Vladimir laments, "the saddest thing is that now the people don't feel that it is their plant. It used to be that patriotism was instilled, worker family dynasties were encouraged, but now, it's a one-year contract. Everyone understands that the contract is like a snare." "The contracts were created to keep people under control.

What is taking place is a concentration of power, vertical authority must penetrate everywhere like tentacles, and totally control everything," explains Vladimir. "On the other hand, history confirms that every dictatorship ends badly for the dictator. We remember Franco, Salazar and Hitler, we remember Stalin and Ceausescu. All the dictatorships came to an end, it's only a matter of time."
 

REPAM
REPAM (the Belarusian Union of Workers of Radio and Electronics Industry, Automobile Machinery, Metalworking Industry and Other Branches of the National Economy), a member organization of the IMF, officially operates in Belarus under the name of Unions of Workers of the Radio and Electronics Industry (REP). Initially, the REP and the ASM (the Union of Workers of the Automobile and Agricultural Machinery Industry) were among the first organizations in the post-Soviet area to join the IMF. By interfering in the internal affairs of the ASM, the authorities gained control over it. When it lost the status of a democratic, independent and representative organization, the ASM was expelled from the IMF. At the same time, the authorities essentially tore apart the second member organization by administrative methods. Not wishing to submit to the ill will of the dictator, supporters of the independent labour movement who wanted to defend the rights of the workers, activists of the ASM and the REP, decided to unite in a single union, REPAM.

A founding congress was held at which the leaders of the new union were elected. The Ministry of Justice initially registered REPAM, and then a few months later, unexpectedly and with no justification, took the unprecedented step of revoking its registration. It was extremely important to continue the effort begun, and the union members decided to keep the name REP for official purposes, although throughout the world the union is known as REPAM.

DECREES ABOVE THE LAW
One of REPAM's priorities is the abolition of fixed-term contracts. "The system of contracts enslaves people, restricts their freedom, we're not talking about free work, people are bound to their jobs. If someone is a good worker, he cannot move to a better job," notes Alexander Bukhvostov, co-chairman of the union. In 2007, REPAM put forward an initiative to abolish the contract system.

Potentially, if citizens of the country can gather 50,000 signatures, they can appeal to parliament and initiate a review of any legislative act of the Republic of Belarus.

"But when everything was ready for collecting the signatures, and an initial group of 500 people was created, we were not given a place to assemble, despite applying three times," recounts Gennady Fedynich, co-chairman of REPAM. "Then we combined a May Day event with a meeting of the group. We set up groups for all the regions, and elaborated a legislative bill." The problem is that when Lukashenko came to power, there began to appear in Belarusian legislation various supra-legal acts issued by the president, acts whose legal status is not quite certain, for example, the names of some of them are not defined in the Constitution. Presidential Decree No. 29 on the introduction of the contract system is an example of such an act. REPAM believed it was important to make the Labour Code the main legislation in the area of labour relations, that is ensure that everything is reflected in the Labour Code. Finally the Ministry of Justice issued an opinion to the effect that a legislative initiative by citizens can only propose amending a law, but as a presidential decree, such as Decree No. 29, is higher than the law, the citizens of the country do not have the right to amend a decree of the president.

In parallel with that work, REPAM has submitted a proposal to Belarusian parliamentarians to ratify ILO Convention 158 "On Termination of Employment at the Initiative of the Employer". Ratification of this convention by Belarus would be tantamount to undertaking to renounce the practice of universal fixed-term employment contracts, and in its recommendations to that convention the ILO indicates that if a contract is concluded with a person for one year, the next contract should be permanent.

"The problem is that people are not prepared to defend themselves, they are paralyzed by fear. At the workplace, efforts are made to divide them. From the politicaleconomic point of view the means of production in our country belongs to the state. And in this country the state means the president. The entire profit goes to the state.

Workers' wages are determined by the state; this is not even capitalism, it is more like slavery," says Alexander Bukhvostov, co-chairman of REPAM, with regret. Perhaps for this reason none of REPAM's proposal have been incorporated into Belarusian legislation. But REPAM is not giving up.

At the end of our conversation Gennady and Alexander thanked the IMF and its affiliates for their solidarity and support and stated flatly that without that support REPAM could not survive. They also stressed the importance of visits to Belarus and in particular to REPAM by delegations of colleagues from other unions from around the world.

THE LAW ON TRADE UNIONS
A new legislative bill, which has been proposed allegedly to bring labour legislation in line with ILO recommendations for case 2090, represents a set of draconian measures intended to completely eliminate independent unions. In particular, the new law sets the minimum permissible number of members for a national union (at least 7,000 members employed in related or similar industries). At present only one independent union in Belarus can boast of such a membership: the Belarusian Independent Trade Union, which consists mainly of miners and workers of the oil refining industry. But even that union does not itself conclude collective agreements, rather it accedes to preexisting contracts in enterprises concluded by unions of the Federation of Trade Unions of Belarus. In the present situation the independent unions cannot exert any real influence on the course of collective bargaining. With the introduction of the new law, they will be forced to move entirely to illegal forms of work.

REPAM, an affiliate of the IMF with a membership of 1,500 and presently holding the status of a national union may be confronted with the problem of whether to continue its activity. One of the main features and problems of the bill is that the workers are denied the right to chose their union, since each union can only accept as members workers of related or similar occupations, while no definition is given of related or similar occupations. The bill is full of similar inexactitudes, which in the future may lead to varying interpretations of the law. The bill is likely to be considered as early as the spring 2008 session of parliament.

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