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30 years after Yugoslavian socialism, Slovenian unions fight for the workers capitalism has forgotten

An interview with lawyer, organizer, and trade union leader Ana Jakopič in Slovenia.

Some choice excerpts:

So I actually come from a family which is like middle class. My parents both have high education and they had a steady job all the time. Of course, during the socialism, people usually had the whole… their lives, they had only one job or maybe two jobs. So the jobs were very stable, the paychecks were very stable, and the housing was very stable. People would pay actually 10% of their income, and they would get a flat for a very low rent, which would be like 10% of today’s rents. And that would mean that they could live normal lives. Also, the working hours were mostly from 6:00 to 2:00, which then enabled people to come home to be with their kids at around 3:00 PM. So people, families were very much more together than they are today. And also the schooling system and kindergartens in Slovenia are free. So even today and they were at that time. So this economic pressures were not that high for my family.

And also for the families around, the ones that were from working class, later on, when the markets crashed, they would get renewed. And so in few years, two to three years, things would stabilize. And one of the things which was very important for Slovenians was this law, which was introduced that people could buy off their apartments for a price of 10% of the market price. So people would buy their apartments at that time for, I don’t know, $15,000, something like that, and they could take it in a form of loans for 20 years. So people then got a lot of these apartments and as ownership, which even today is one of the big important things why people still live quite a quality life in Slovenia. But the new generations don’t have these advantages.

And with the coming of capitalism, the crashing of this permanent contracts came. So for us, then later on, we were wondering if when we were going through schools, what jobs we will get, what paychecks we will get, but that was something that was unknown to our parents. So that was definitely different, but still the atmosphere was positive. So schooling, also with university schooling, is free in Slovenia. And there is this system that if you work during your studies, then you don’t pay so much taxes. So that’s also something that helps a lot of students. But of course during the ’90s and later on, these differences between people in their economic status became bigger and bigger. We used to have a very, how to say, small differences in comparison to other Western countries. So we were actually leading even the Scandinavian countries, but today we are not at that point anymore.

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And as you said, the working class people really, really suffered a lot during this time. And their rights have been really, really, really, how to say, lowered. And as you said, this is something which is still a shock to Slovenian society when trade unionists, especially the activists, as we are called, some of us try to bring the stories of workers, especially in tourism, but also in other… like food industry out in the media. And people are shocked how workers are treated. And mostly these are workers from other countries, migrant workers who don’t even speak the language and are really treated very badly. So we took that model from America, or how to say, and we applied it very uncritically, and it’s very hard for a trade union movement to stop these practices. We do try.

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So yeah, first of all, during the ’90s, like I said, in the beginning, a lot of markets crashed. So that was a big crisis, which was used very intensely by the Western economists, especially the Chicago Boys that came many times to Slovenia trying to push the narrative of privatization and of letting people go in mass so that the shock can be made to change the structure of the society economically, but also to cut the ties between people and this empathy, which still existed at that time. For example, if I just say it in a way like it was a mantra that even for richer people, it’s much better to live in a society when you don’t have people who are starving, you don’t have people who are barely making it. That a society where everybody lives a good life or good enough life is something which we all want to have since it’s much better to live in such a world, which is true.

But later on this mantra came that there is a price to be paid if somebody wants to get richer. And of course we have to pay people more if they are more productive. So this mantra of productivity came in. And of course, people who were being paid more and more were not the ones who were actually contributing more, but were those who were privatizing companies, which were built during socialism. So quite funny thing is when you look at the Slovenian market, you still have only companies which were built actually in socialism. I don’t find… I was just thinking when preparing mentally to talk to you, which company was built anew after capitalism came to Slovenia, and I couldn’t find any, to be honest. Maybe some little companies, but this would happen in socialism as well.

Whereas privatization, like buying of our big companies from the Western companies or States even, like airport, the biggest airport was bought by the German country. So, Germany itself. So they were built in socialism. And it was a paradox that they were saying like socialism was not doing any good companies, but in the end, when you look at it, they’re just reselling all the time these companies that were actually built during that period.