Deindustrijalizacija i radnički otpor - Pokret za slobodu

Interview with a Zastava Elektro Workerand Freedom Fight AcvistOn May 25, 2009 in the city of Rača, near Kragujevac in Serbia,a new wave of protests has been unleashed by workersof the Zastava Elektro factory. The factory produces electricalgoods and is the only remaining enterprise in Rača thatcontinues to function to this day. The workers began theirprotests with marches and more recently by seizing the municipalcouncil building. For the last few days, the workershave been standing guard occupying the council building inshifts.We talk to Milan Srećković, a Zastava Elektro worker andFreedom Fight activist 1 , who explains the situation in hisown words:Zastava Elektro was privatized in 2006 and handed over to a consortiumof private stakeholders headed by Ranko Dejanović, the husbandof the current president of the Serbian Parliament Slavica ĐukićDejanović and a one-time founder of JUL’s Rača chapter 2 .The factory made a deal with the Polish multinational Delphi andreceived financial support from the State Agency for Foreign Investmentsand Export Promotion for the deal. The number of workerssoon jumped from an initial 300 to an additional 500 workers hired ona short-term basis. However, by the end of last year, Zastava Elektro’saccounts were blocked, Delphi severed the contract, dismantled theplants machinery and returned it to Poland. In our correspondencewith Delphi they made it clear that the partnership with our factorywas halted due to the poor work of the factory’s management and itsowner, who - in addition to everything else - had placed the factory intosubstantial debt with a number of commercial banks. Zastava Elektro’sworkers haven’t been paid their salaries for months, haven’t receivedacknowledgement of their accrued workdays, and the factory’s ownershave appropriated the money that Delphi delivered into our accountsin order to pay those working abroad for Delphi.1 Freedom Fight - Serbo-Croatian: Pokret za slobodu2 JUL stands for the Yugoslav United Left, a ’neo-communist’ political party oftycoons that was formed in the 1990s by Mirjana Marković, the wife of former Serbianand (later) Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosević.335