Serbs Give Pink Slips to Their ‘Red’ Bosses

VRANJE, Yugoslavia —  On a whispered signal, 500 women in red smocks switched off their sewing machines last week on a factory floor the size of a city block, launching a three-day strike by 6,500 co-workers that toppled the plant’s chief executive.

The unrest spread to Vranje’s hospital, ambulance service, bus company, technical school, food inspection lab and a shoe factory. Roughly two-thirds of the town’s labor force demanded and won the resignations of unpopular bosses installed by the regime of Slobodan Milosevic.

Since the Yugoslav president’s ouster three weeks ago, his Socialist Party cronies have lost control of workplaces across Serbia, the country’s main republic, in an uprising against the mini-despots who really ran people’s lives.

The purge of “red directors” in this industrial town of 65,000, a longtime fortress of Socialist power that is still in the hands of a Socialist mayor, shows how deep Serbia’s revolution runs. It is empowering people like Dr. Petar Bulajic, a soft-spoken psychiatrist who earns $65 per month; Predrag Dimic, a shoemaker who handed the get-lost ultimatum to his ashen-faced boss; and Gordana Stojkovic, whose sewing brigade started the strike during the evening shift of Oct. 11.

Removal of Milosevic Inspires Laborers

Their grievances were economic and professional, but it was Milosevic’s capitulation five days earlier to huge demonstrations in Belgrade--the Yugoslav and Serbian capital 170 miles to the northwest--that emboldened them. They got guidance from the Democratic Opposition of Serbia but are wary of turning their uprising into a tool of that party.

“I anticipated this moment for years, and when it came, my heart wanted to jump,” Stojkovic said as she recounted the strike at Jumko, the biggest textile and clothing maker in the Balkans. Her work brigade leader, Nada Vasileva, added: “We chose this moment because the time for dictators was over.”

The seamstresses are helping to push Serbia’s post-communist era a step beyond those of Russia and some other Eastern European countries, where party appointees kept control of many large enterprises even after allotting a majority of shares to employees or private investors.

During Milosevic’s 13 years in power, Socialist Party loyalists ran public and nominally privatized companies as they wished, often to enrich themselves. Employees became shareholders in name only, held in check by the police and a Socialist-run union that was the only one permitted to negotiate with management or collect dues.

During the past week in Vranje, police stood aside as upstart worker assemblies swept into one boardroom after another and switched registration en masse to two unions allied with the opposition. One executive left his factory under police escort.

Insurgent “crisis staffs” there and at other workplaces are choosing new managers and summoning police inspectors to investigate the financial dealings of the ousted bosses.

Surprisingly, this revenge is taking place under the helpless gaze of a city council led by Socialists who, according to disputed official returns, won 59 of the 65 seats in the Sept. 24 election that Milosevic lost.

Mayor Miroljub Stojcic felt obliged to fire the editors of the municipal television station and newspaper after the local Democratic Opposition leader threatened to lead a march against their premises.

“Probably the police have orders from Belgrade not to interfere,” the exasperated mayor said in an interview. Last week, he urged new Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica in a letter to halt “anarchy and chaos” that he says is hurting the town’s export-dependent economy, which relied on exports even during years of international sanctions.

But the rebels have refrained from violence and resumed work on their own--after shedding the likes of Stanica Janjic, Mirko Dimitrijevic and Dr. Blagoje Tincic.

President of Jumko for nine years, Janjic was the kind of boss who thrived under Milosevic and helped sustain his regime. Evading Western sanctions against Yugoslavia, he continued to export clothes, including military uniforms, to Italy and some foes in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

But the seamstresses said he piled on extra shifts without overtime pay when work was plentiful, sent them on unpaid leave when work was scarce, padded the payroll with Socialist cronies and fired anyone who tried to organize a protest. When Milosevic visited the plant and complained about a dirty toilet, they said, Janjic axed the cleaning lady.

“Half of Vranje depended on him. I wondered how he could sleep at night knowing how we lived and how little we had for our children,” said Stojkovic, a mother of two preteens whose husband also makes clothing at Jumko.

By the end of the Milosevic era, the couple’s combined salary had dipped below $60 per month.

If workers walk out of one shop at Jumko, the plant’s security force is supposed to contain the strike by locking workers inside the other shops. But in this case, the seamstresses’ revolt spread too fast, and the nine guards eventually joined it.

As thousands of strikers massed outside the plant the next day, Janjic’s top deputy offered to negotiate with their leaders but was shouted down. By the third day, Jumko had a new president, unchallenged by the old one.

At the Kostana shoe factory across town, Dimitrijevic saw the revolt coming. He tried to defuse it by allowing his 4,000 workers to quit the Socialist-run union last week and join one called Independence.

That didn’t help. When he came to work last Thursday, the 65-year-old executive found 14 strikers at the long table in his boardroom. Predrag Dimic, a shoemaker in jeans and a blue smock, handed him a scribbled list of demands backed by more than 2,000 signatures.

“Resignation of the president of the company and the entire management,” the note began. “Payment of all overdue wages . . . an audit . . . criminal investigations of all those managers whose work is found to be improper.”

“He was paler than a corpse,” said Dimic, who earns $40 a month after 10 years of making shoes. “I thought to myself, ‘If that man drops dead, I will have to bear him on my soul.’ ”

Instead, the boss retreated to another room, called a lawyer and signed his resignation. Later, he disputed its validity.

“The courts will decide whether a mob can annihilate my 29 years of work,” said Dimitrijevic, a man with thick eyebrows and a Milosevic-style shock of towering gray hair. “I made Kostana everything it was. If we all belonged to one party, it was because that party brought quite a lot of money to the factory.”

Indeed, Vranje once enjoyed relative prosperity as a showcase of socialist industry. Jumko, Kostana and the town’s other big employer, the Simpo furniture plant, were founded in the 1960s and built loyal, well-trained work forces.

But as Serbia’s economy crumbled under war, sanctions and mismanagement in the 1990s, the bosses misread labor grievances as political dissent and became abusive, according to Bozidar Jovic, local boss of the Socialist-led Alliance of Trade Unions of Serbia.

“The managers were party officials who thought they were untouchable,” said Jovic, whose union members are defecting by the thousands. “Our union did not choose those managers.”

Medical Staff Rejects Socialist Appointments

Scrambling to save its influence, Jovic’s union moved quietly last weekend to replace Dr. Blagoje Tincic and two other discredited managers of Vranje’s hospital and ambulance service with new Socialist faces.

Under Tincic’s tenure, doctors needed the right party cards to get advanced training for higher-paying specialties. At least $40,000 in donations to the hospital for medicine, a kidney dialysis machine and other equipment vanished, doctors say.

News of the Socialist union’s new appointments brought the hospital to a standstill Monday. Bulajic, the psychiatrist who heads an independent union there, moved to challenge them by gathering more than 200 medical workers into a small auditorium.

As agitated physicians puffed furiously on cigarettes, Dr. Zoran Zdravkovic, a leader of the Socialist-led union, rose to defend the appointments.

“Shame on you!” a colleague shouted. “If I were you, I wouldn’t dare speak at this meeting. Your party has committed terrible crimes.”

The assembly voted to overturn the appointments, putting an opposition-led group of 14 doctors in charge of the hospital.

After the two-hour meeting, Bulajic retreated to his office and poured a glass of a plum brandy. It was still morning, but the psychiatrist was frazzled. He was also worried by the outbursts against the Socialist minority and the push by opposition party members to dominate workplaces.

“I must apologize for this mania, but our famous Balkan tensions are exploding,” he said. “Our interest now is to protect the doctors from authoritarians of any kind. We must get politics out of the hospital.”