Press release from the Women's Front for Labor and Social Rights
Zagreb, May 21, 2014.
A month ago, the Women's Front for Labor and Social Rights sent a request to the parliamentary caucuses to publicly express their position on the Labor Law, and on our specific proposals for individual articles of the Law.
Although the Women's Front thus attempted to activate the Croatian political elite in order to bring this important debate back into the public sphere, and to finally begin a conversation based on consistent arguments and valid data and analysis, this did not happen. Moreover, when it comes to assessing the level of the current state of democracy in the negotiations between the two readings, it has never been lower. We are witnessing a chronic absence of healthy and developed deliberation, which has been replaced by nothing less than secret negotiations and the silence of the Government, employers and unions, as a result of which we are left - completely uncynically - to fantasize and speculate about the course of the negotiations on which our existence, our working and social future depend.
Given the media silence on the negotiations, we are left to rely on bad experience, which tells us that fundamental laws are often generously presented to the public just before the summer recess, which always has a negative impact on organizing structured pressure on the Government. In addition, it is very likely that the current delay is being contributed to by the Government's concentration on the EU elections, in which they are undoubtedly investing more capacity than in protecting workers through the Employment Act.
With this statement, the Women's Front for Labor and Social Rights also wants to draw attention to the role of the academic community in the process of adopting the new Labor Code. Instead of speaking out in the fight to preserve the material and social rights of workers, on the contrary and worryingly, it is active on a completely different level. It tacitly and obviously approves of its own personnel who, with their advisory roles, legitimize the order that protects the interests of capital, even though, as university professors, they are paid from public money. This is, for example, the exceptionally successful cooperation of the so-called economic and legal experts and the Croatian Employers' Association, of experts who advise the Ministry of Labor and Pension System who then join forces with the banking sector, publicly advocating risky products of the financial industry for "useful" projects and an unsustainable investment climate. Croatia is no exception, such a sale of the academic community and its harmonious alliance with the actors mentioned in the previous sentence have been encountered in world history whenever material and social rights have been violated through the destruction and reform of laws affecting labor.
And while these days the most disenfranchised are drowning in the floods, and tomorrow when the water recedes, they will not have the means to maintain a bare life and establish a normalized beginning because they are not flexible, efficient, enterprising or adaptable enough to the market flood, in the meantime, on dry land, behind closed doors, great minds are crafting yet another law that will be responsible for future generations of underpaid workers. Only through joint, structured pressure can we try to prevent the manipulative publication of the Law before the summer in order to avoid immobilizing the organized reaction, and thus put a brake on the planned, safe and unhindered formalization of the flexibilization of labor legislation.
The Women's Front for Labor and Social Rights calls on parliamentarians to read the objections of unions and the civil society to the proposed amendments to the Labor Law, and especially the non-corrupt parts of the academic community to be at the forefront of the public debate on the social direction dictated by the liberalization and precarization of the labor market, and to raise the issue of the commodification of the profession versus its autonomy.
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The Women's Front for Labor and Social Rights consists of: Autonomous Women's House Zagreb, Babe, BRID, Center for Women's Studies, CESI, Kontra, HURS Women's Coordination, NHS Women's Committee, Roda, ROSA (Center for Women Victims of War), Croatian Trade Union, Croatian Pensioners' Union, Association for Assistance and Education of Victims of Mobbing, Ready for Work, Croatian Women's Network, Women's Section of the Union of Croatian Trade Unions.
