Making Ends Meet

The miners of the mining giant "Trepca" are on hunger strike the second time around. This time they are barricaded at the eighth level of the "Ajvalija" mine in the vicinity of Pristina. About one hundred miners of the Serb nationality from the above mentioned mine along with their fellow miners from the nearby "Kisnica" (as the ethnic Albanians have been out of

work since the strike in the Stari trg mine in 1989) have threatened that they will not leave the shafts until their requests, which had also been presented to the Serbian Government, have been fulfilled. They demand that they be paid their salaries for January and February, and that salaries be paid out on the regular basis in the future.

The miners also want to visit Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic ("he is the only one we trust") and Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic. This is not a political strike, it is economic, they explained. The Strikers Committee is holding the general manager of the Trepca mining combine, Krsta Jovanovic, and his deputy Slavko Kisic responsible for the newly created situation in this industrial branch in Kosovo. On the other hand, the Pristina daily in Serbian, Jedinstvo, has informed its readers that after 18 years of recording losses, the company managed the last year with positive results, while the salaries were paid exclusively from its own reproduction.

But, whether we want to admit it or not, everybody in this area, both the Serbs and the Albanians, can hardly make ends meet. Although the majority of the Serb population is employed in the state sector, a monthly salary ranges from 25 to little over 50 DM, which is not enough to secure a good night's sleep.

It has been learned that some 200 employees of Mehanizacija, the unit within the Binacka Morava in Gnjilane are striking as well, since their monthly salaries do not reach even the minimum wage, which is about

60 DM. And, how the Albanians actually manage to make ends meet is perhaps best illustrated by the analysis in the Pristina daily in Albanian, Bujku. Until three years ago there were 230,000 workers employed in Kosovo, 70 percent of whom, that is 160,000 workers were Albanian. After this time period 100,000 of them were left jobless, while 30,000 workers of the Serb and Montenegrin nationality were hired at the same time. According to the same source, there are currently some 60,000 Albanians working, which comprises 3 percent of the total number of those employed. This is 17 times less compared to the participation of the Serbs and Montenegrins in the make-up of the local population, whose percentage amounts to a little less than ten percent.

Therefore, according to the given data, out of all capable of every thirtieth Albanian, while every second Serb is employed. The author of the text further gives the answer to the question: what the social welfare of the citizens who have been jobless for three years now is like.

Considering the fact that an average Albanian family has seven members it follows that the minimum existence is secured for 840,000 Albanians, including pensioners and recipients of different types of social welfare. Some 210,000 live on the profits of their own private firms, one million and 50,000 have some sort of financial security, while 80,000 Albanians have no income whatsoever.