The journal Yugoslav Trade Unions, which is published in several 1 8 by the Central Council of the Yugoslav Trade Union Confederation, poh Vana remarkable article in the December, 1966, edition, (Vol. 7, No. 30). Rntitled "A Phenemenon: Stoppage of Work", it grapples painfully with what is clearly a rising trend of short, plant or local level, strike action, It summarises the disputes in four examples, and in each case comes down firmly on the side of the strikers, Teachers in Titovo Uzice refused their salaries in a collective demonstration against the Commune Council's decision to pay them less than similar salaries elsewhere, A wages dispute at a glass factory involved 550 workers in a thirty hour stoppage, over the use of the personal income fund for holiday pay. One department of the automobile factory in Kragujevac stopped work in protest at a rate-cutting decision of the workers' council. 400 workers in another case stopped work for eight hours over the discrimination in pay between office workers and themselves, The article says of the Titovoc Uzice case that the Commune Council should have quickly met the justified demands of the teachers; of the glass factory that the workers’ rights "had been usurped by the workers' council"; of the car factory, that "the long fingers of the workers' council interfered with the self-management of the Working Unit No. 130" (the department in question) "even though there was neither political nor economic logic to what it" (the workers' council) "was doing."
In attempting to generalise from such experiences, the article concludes that "in the main, it is a question of worker resistance to the violation of rights affecting the distribution of personal incomes, of a protest against wnco-ordinated onerational conditions, and lestly, of struggle “_ against the still-strong roots of a bureaucracy which has survived in the self-management relationship also." In order to distinguish between this "phenonemon" and the strike action of workers in capitalist countries, the writer concludes: "So, stoppage of work and strike are two different things. Im the Yugoslav’ .conditions, stoppage of work is a manifestation of worker struggle for the realisation of the already acquired rights, for self-management as a whole to pass direct into the hands of workmen. And striking, in many cowmtries, is struggle for the acquisition of rights which the workmen do not possess,” Looking more deeply at the matter, it would seem that the workers’ Councils and Commune Councils are developing increasingly into controllers of the "surplus". This interpretation of the needs of the "surplus" has developed in ways increasingly antagonistic to the needs of the workers, who resort to strike action against something which has passed beyond their control, The use of the reserves, the "surplus" in the Yugoslav economy is, we know, more and more related to the dictates of "the market" in which the enterprise is situated. The alienating influence of the market, mediated through the Workers' Council, creates antagonistic relations between that Council and the workers. The official attitude of the unions to this development, whilst it will have the unqualified approval of the pure liberal, must be seen by socialists as seriously ambiguous,
It. is healthy and desirable that the mions should defend "the right to
strike", but if they see such protests as the product merely of "bureaucratic
survivals" which can be eliminated by improved administrative forms and
constitutions in the self-management machinery, they are not recognising
the underlying cause of the antagonism. Bureaucracy not merely "survives"
(from the earlier stalinist model of adminstrative centralien) but is being
re-created in new forms as a result of the growth of the market and of
commodity relations. The way to overcome the contradiction is through the
growth ofan overall political workers' democracy which embraces the control
of the total product through democratic planning. This in turn requires
not the demotion of political control over the economy (which is the object
of Tito's recent reforms of the state and Communist League, ard which have
so delighted liberal commentators in the West) but its elevation above the
power of market forces, and its democratisation. The trade unions, being
an integral part of the political structure of the country, cannot avoid
this issue, Their present attitude seems to presage a turn towards the
"economism" which is characteristic of unions in a market economy.