Issue 512 - October 12, 2001

Placing Karic's bank under an "administrative" order could mean that an attempt is being made to finally resolve and put under control the situation in the large "black box" in which for the past ten years Serbia's "hot capital" was "processed" - in order to provide it with a legal turnover in privileged domestic operations or its escape abroad, so that both here and especially over there - it could be distributed primarily to the members of the "patriotic model family"

Why is it easier for coal miners to valorise their undoubtedly important, heavy and risky profession in a direct negotiation with Djindjic, than to try to prove the same thing to hundreds of thousands of unemployed administrative workers in their collective?

"Can you please help me decide. I never made calculations before, but now I have to. I'm not too good with this," are the words with which Vesna addressed her next-door-neighbor several months ago. At first glance, this might seem like ordinary woman's chit chat, with the exception that the next-door-neighbor is an official at the unemployment office in Kragujevac, and Vesna, the woman making inquiries, is one of the several thousand workers from Kragujevac's Zastava Factory who were on unpaid leave of absence at the factory and were declared surplus labor in August of this year. Vesna and her colleagues were offered three choices at that time: 1) for the separate company "Zastava Employment and Education" to take over their case and to find them employment (in the meantime they would be getting 45 percent of the salary which they used to get while working actively at Zastava); 2) to resign from their jobs with a settlement of 200 German marks accounted for each year that they worked at the Zastava Factory; 3) to get a settlement calculated on the basis of the number of years of employment at the factory, multiplied by a coefficient (at most five percent of their total salaries while employed), and to go on unemployment where they would be at most 24 months, getting 40 to 80 percent of the minimal wage in Serbia. In other words, for the first time in post-war Serbia, a mass laying off of workers occurred, with several options which workers can choose from.