Hello friends and comrades. I tried for the first time to submit something on the "thought" forum but had no feedback other than to make a summary, improve the format so it is less labour intensive and link to my article. So I'm doing on and hoping that somebody will have feedback on the topic.
SUMMARY
In the other Europe, less represented on forums like these for many reasons, many people are working for less than 200 euros a month. In some of these countries, workers are being fucked by schemes which are supposed to be enpowering them but fuck them over even more - in particular workers' buyouts during privatization and worker-management partnerships. In practice, these buyouts provide large shareholders, often ex-management, to acquire capital and legitimacy which they then use to liquidate the business and sell-over undervalued, amortized assets. Often workers have no idea that this is the goal and invest their life savings in these schemes thinking they are saving their jobs and their factories.
The anarcho-syndicalists in Poland may have their hearts in the right place, but some of them not their heads. Recently there was a situation like this --- but everybody missed the call. Last week people organized a big action for somebody to be reinstated to his job but almost nobody knew anything about the background to the case. Anarchists provided incorrect information for unknown reasons: we were told that Slawek was fired for making a union, for union activity, for fighting for health and safety conditions in his factory, for talking to the press or because somebody wanted to take over a worker-controlled factory.
In reality was different: that there was a worker-management buyout of a company in bankruptcy with lots off devalued assets. Some former workers participated in the buyout, but at the time of the firing, lots of wage labourers were employed there. Essentially, a member of the former management and an economist exploited the naivity to the workers and by increasing the share capital, acquired a majority stake in the company.
It's not clear they did this in a legal way two and a half years ago - but if they acted illegally then, there was a chance to overturn this and even force them out of positions of authority - then. Problem is that there was only misinformation. It's not clear why.
One possibility is that people don't know the difference between a worker-run collective and a worker-management buyout run on capitalist terms. (Although I think it's only part of the picture of how people were not completely informed.) I think that if we want to help workers out, it's important to know this and to be able to warn others to avoid the mistakes to workers like Slawek and his colleagues at Uniontex, and to avoid the mistakes of the anarchists who ultimately did not take the most effective action. It's not much help if we are just naively cheering the takeover of Uniontex by workers (which is basically how it was presented) and don't understand that it's a scam, that there are possibilities for the accumulation of more shares and voting rights, that there can in fact be a majority of non-shareholder workers who have no voting rights. And then in the end the best we can do is bus everybody to under the factory gate to demand that Slawek get his 200 euro a month job back.
In the last two days I talked to some people who have experience in privatization about this and it confirmed what I thought based on other situations - that in Eastern Europe, a great deal, if not the majority of these worker buyouts end badly for the workers. In most cases they don't lose their initial investments, but sometimes even that happens.
So I was wondering if other people had experience with this area or know of any cases.
If you have time and energy to read through the case of Uniontex, I have it in the "thought" forum in bad format, or in more reader-friendly form here: http://cia.bzzz.net/worker_buyouts_and_the_story_of_uniontex
