By Peter Annear
PRAGUE — News of mass sackings next month at the Krosno Glass works, one of Poland's first five companies privatised at the end of last year, is an indication that the rapid advance towards privatisation in Eastern European will put enormous pressure on workers' organisations. The glass works is planning to sack around a fifth of its 7000 employees.
The rapid integration of east Germany into the dominant west German economy has especially put the squeeze on workers. Unemployment in the former has blown out to 790,000, or 8.9% of the workforce, in February. A further 1.9 million working drastically reduced hours constitute hidden unemployment. Altogether, a third of the former 's workforce is not gainfully employed.
Living costs are rising rapidly; wages lag behind. East German metalworkers, for example, will wait at least three years to earn the same basic wage as their western counterparts, as a result of a recently concluded agreement. Even then, working hours and fringe benefits will remain inferior, keeping wage costs 10 to 15% below west Germany by 1994.
Devised with the cooperation of the union leadership, the deal will give shopfloor workers 62.5% of west German wages from April 1 (with 58.5% for office workers), before rising to 100% in three further steps.
These concessions come in the wake of a strike of 250,000 east German rail workers in November for job security and wages of 60% of their west German counterparts'. More than half east German rail workers are likely to lose their jobs when capitalist standards are applied.
Union action has been sparked in Hungary too. In October, the country was brought to a standstill by taxi and transport workers who spontaneously blockaded roads and bridges into Budapest and across the country for four days protesting against rising petrol prices and falling living standards. This was a show of society-wide civil disobedience, Laszlo Andor, an economist with the Hungarian Institute for Economic and Social Research of Trade Unions, told Green Left.
On the eve of the blockade, the older unions tried to head it off in favour of negotiations with the government, but the transport workers held out. Panicked by the strike, the European Community brought forward a US$2.2 billion loan to head off militant action in other Eastern European states.
Workers in the east lack confidence in official trade unionism. Now, alongside the old unions, new independent unions are emerging. But these are weak and short of money; they have little organisational skill and almost no experience in how to operate in a market environment.
In Czechoslovakia and Hungary, new unions have tried to wrest the workers' banner from the old unions, but still have little clout. Yugoslav unions, formerly tied to the government, have become more he impossible task of wringing concessions out of a disintegrating economy.
In Poland, where the independent Solidarity trade union led the upsurge of 1980, the unions now face an identity crisis. Solidarity was transformed into a political organisation and then split among different platforms. Solidarity's former leader, Lech Walesa, now leads the pro-capitalist right wing of the government.
"If we want to transform Solidarity into a pure trade union, we should be glad that Lech Walesa left", the union's new chairman, Marian Krzaklewski, told Reuters new agency.
Different political currents are driving the creation of the new unions. In the wake of the transport blockade, the Hungarian government attempted to integrate employers, government and unions into a corporatist "social partnership".
Pal Forgacs is president of one of Hungary's new unions, the Independent Democratic League of Free Trade Unions. The league is politically close to the liberal-right Free Democrats (who identify with the German Free Democrat Party). Other new federations, such as Hungary's Solidarity, are more to the left. Solidarity has links with Left Alternative.
"The problem in Hungary is one of survival, not of getting better working conditions", Forgacs told Reuters correspondent Michael Shields. "In a country with such a difficult social situation and unfortunately no workers' party, no social democratic or labour party, it means that we have a very important role: to fight for a certain social justice."
But, he said, unions would not fight lay-offs if management could prove they were necessary to help companies survive. "We know that it is impossible to have enterprises as overstaffed as they are now. But you can negotiate to find a more human approach", he argued.
At stake is the stability of societies which must learn how to balance conflicting demands of capital and labour in a peaceful, productive way, according to Forgacs. "I am afraid that if things do not change very quickly trade unions can lose all their influence and at any time a social eruption could occur that the trade unions could not control any more."
According to Konstantin Trenchev, head of the Podkrepa labour confederation in Bulgaria: "We do not want to stop reform ... We know that if we do, problems will accumulate and it will be more difficult to solve them in the future."
Supporting political reform without abandoning workers' rights is the key problem. In this, the unions' attitude to privatisation is pivotal.
"We are not necessarily against privatisation", says the independent socialist Hungarian academic Tamas Krausz, "but let the privatisation be for the people, for the workers". It will be necessary to shift the axis of the left's activity "to defending the ownership rights of the working classes, to organise mass actions that would support the workers' efforts to exercise a check over the privatisation process".
Collective ownership and genuine employee share schemes should be developed rather than simply handing over industries to big capital.
A leader of Left Alternative, Krausz says it would be wrong to "counterpose so-called efficiency to people, to defence of the environment, to the ongoing struggle for social justice, which includes the defence of human rights". Emphasising the need for independent trade union and other mass activity, Krausz says "it has to be recognised that socialism is the movement of civil society".