Jobs at Expense of Labour Rights?
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Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests. The definitions quoted above are taken from Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and are a part of a section of the Declaration that deals with social and economic rights, together with articles on social security, leisure time, standards of living and education.
At best, the efforts in all these countries were to be based on the social-liberalism prevalent in continental Europe and the social welfare states of the “old” European Union. At least, that was the general idea. The far more common approach to the issue, we should say, was based on the laissez-faire policies much preferred in the Anglo-American part of the world, restricting the role of the state and holding firm that the marketplace will provide for a just redistribution of wealth in all layers of society. In addition, there were the rising globalization trends and tendencies which tender to the need of the capital to move production to those areas of the world where labour is cheapest; and the fact that any talk of even mildly socialist (or rather, social-democratic) ideas in the countries that have only recently moved from real or self-management socialism towards free-market capitalism brings about the risk that someone is named crypto-bolshevik or a “commie”, possibly the two “dirtiest” words of this times in the world. This text is written on the eve of May 1, the International Labour Day, Its origins are in the great struggle of 19th Century socialist and worker movements for eight-our labour day, fair working conditions and fair wages. What have we to show for ourselves, in this day and age, in this geographic area, on the four points of Article 23 of the UDHR quoted above? The right to work, as defined in Article 23, today seems to be the subject of a great debate, centred on the question, whether should we understand is literally, as the right of every person to be employed in a salaried position, that should be enforced by the state by providing jobs to all its citizens, or in terms of prevention of situations in which a person is actually prevented and faces obstacles in attempts to realize that right, including inability to find a job at his or her personal preferences. One look at the unemployment figures around the region should suffice, really, to illustrate how obsolete such a debate may be here. Ranging from 17 percent in Croatia to over 40 percent in several countries, unemployment remains the mother of all problems for the economies of all countries in the Balkans. The states do whatever they could to attract the all important direct, green-field foreign investments, as the surest way to lower unemployment rates and create new jobs, while facing many difficulties. The relatively high costs of labour here, at least compared to some other areas of the world, such as Southeast and East Asia, make SEE less attractive to big multinationals who remain the most desired investors. The attempts of the state to provide for higher profit margins for possible investors when accounting for costs of labour, leads to attempts to cut their tax obligations, which means that the state is left with less money to cover for its other obligations under paragraph 1 of Article 23, protection from unemployment. Also, all countries in the region suffer from the burden of grey economy, especially in the labour market, where huge numbers of people work illegally, without social allowances paid on the minimal wages they receive. The prohibition of discriminatory wages, in a situation of high unemployment rates seems to be of lesser concern. The rationale is, people should be happy to get any salary at all, and not quite worry about the fact whether the salary is fair and if it provides for adequate standards of living of Article 25 of UDHR. Which is not to say that there are no other forms of discrimination, especially of women, not only in terms of their right to maternity leave and right to privacy and sovereignty of the person. Everywhere, women are asked in job interviews about their marital status, plans to give birth and, in most extreme cases, were even being asked to sign a statement that they would not get pregnant within a certain amount of years. Child labour is also a problem, especially in the grey-economy sector, where children of all ages are used to peddle all sorts of contraband and smuggled goods on the street. The right to just and fair salary is also a problem. This is due to several reasons, of which unemployment is, once again, a major one. As we said in the previous paragraph, any work and any salary is very much preferable to no work and no salary at all. In addition, most businesspeople in the region still demand the high profit rates that all sorts of ventures yielded in the early days of totally unregulated capitalism that we had in most of the 1990’s, especially during the wars in former Yugoslavia, when trading in sanctioned goods could make people exorbitantly rich over-night. The corner-stone of every form of capitalism, the urge for ever higher profit margins today, in a much more regulated markets, means that employers will try to cut corners whenever possible, and most likely, at the expense of workers salaries. Finally, we have the problem of trade unions and worker organizing. Also hampered in most countries by the high unemployment rates, meaning that employers, especially in smaller enterprises and companies have the luxury to fire all workers willing to unionize and replace them easily in the labour market, unions seem to still be in search of their true role in contemporary societies, in terms of protection of workers’ rights and collective bargaining. The largest and strongest trade unions remain in public sector and those few big companies the managed to survive the privatization and bankruptcy onslaught in the first years of transition. Occasionally, trade unions or organizations of pensioners manage to discover their innate political power and transcend it into pledges from political parties during elections, or even seats in the parliament, as was the case of Croatian Party of Pensioners, which holds three seats in the Croatian Sabor. Most of the time, though, trade unions play second fiddle to the Government, either for reasons of disunity in their own ranks, or for fear that any attempt at protection of jobs or local production may somehow jeopardize a country’s ability to attract investors or the ambitions to enter European integrations. For more detailed answers on these and other issues and how they play out in individual countries in the region, visit the appropriate articles for each individual country. Albania Bosnia and Herzegovina Croatia Kosovo Macedonia |
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