May day is celebration day, but it is also a day to remind us that the struggle still goes on. Nothing has been resolved, we are still in struggle to protect our living conditions and to change the world for the benefit of all peoples. The corporate world is relentless as it works with the various governments to privatise everything in the attempt to remove any social fabric from our society. The effects of privatisation has been more devasting and more brutal in some of those countries where natinalisation was the norm. Below is an extract of a recent and inspiring struggle from Bosnia Herzegovina, in particular, Tuzla.
The multi-ethnic, industrial town of Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina counts on a long tradition of workers’ struggle: at the entrance of the city a huge monument representing a miner holding a gun in place of a pick celebrates the miners’ armed rebellion of 1920 against industrial slavery, known as Husinska buna.Read the full article HERE:
After the nationalization of its factories under the socialist system of Tito’s Yugoslavia, in the last decades the industrial apparatus underwent a process of privatization which resulted in their bankruptcy and consequent job loss for most of the workers. The detergent factory DITA represents an emblematic case: while before the war it guaranteed 1,400 working places, after its privatization in 2007 its major owner — heavily indebted with bank loans — stopped paying pension funds and health insurance to the workers. Following the closure of their firm, in December 2012 the workers of DITA started pickets night and day outside the factory, unfortunately without succeeding to prosecute the owner
