Jim asks:
> thanks for this message. I have a question: wasn't one reason for the
> movement away from workers' control (socialized property?) is that there
> was excessive decentralization, which led to continuous contracting and
> re-contracting even within factories?
>
Under the 1976 Law on Associated Labour, enterprises were
broken into BOALs (Basic Organizations of Associated Labour)
e.g. in a dairy there was three organizations -- the production
workers, the marketing and delivery workers and the administrative
and clerical staff. They would negotiate between them what budget
each would have for wages and then wages within each BOAL
would be negotiated within the workers council. This was done in
an attempt to democratize the workplace and the process of self-
management. In practice, however, the managers had much more
influence than the model intended in part because they controlled
the information that went to the wcs in the BOALs, in part because
of the time taken to carry out all the negotiations which reduced
productivity and, hence, potential wages. As a result, the workers
themselves gradually came to oppose the decentralization. In the
dairy I mentioned, about 1988 the workers voted to abolish the
BOALS and Work Organization and revert to a single workers
council. But this did not mean a move away from self-management
or support for social ownership among the workers. Indeed,
support for social ownership among the workers remained,
according to a opinion poll taken around that time, very strong.
Indeed, it was popular support for self-management in Slovenia, the
emergence of a strong labour movement, and continuing strength of
the political left (and the willingness of managers to resist the
advice from western economists) that allowed Slovenia to make the
transition relatively successfully while maintaining some measures
of self-management and co-determination through worker-buyouts
of socially owned enterprises. I have written about that in part (with
my collaborator, Bogomil Ferfila) in a recently published book
(2000) _Slovenia: On the Edge of the European Union_ (University
Press of America) if anyone is interested in getting more details.
Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba
