Soon after his swearing-in ceremony as the Minister of Labour, Luka Mesec visited the Maribor foundry. He promised the employees of the foundry that he would stop the sale of the company in trouble and present a workers’ buy-out instead. Months and years passed, the “workers’ buy-out” turned out to be a utopia, and the harsh reality includes Red Cross food parcels for employees who have not yet received their August salaries.
But even before the proliferation of utopian projects from the encyclopaedia of socialist mistakes, Luka Mesec intervened in the process of the sale of the Maribor foundry. “We are standing in front of the Maribor Foundry (Mariborska livarna Maribor – MLM), where only 350 workers remain out of the 2,300 who once worked there. But 350 workers means 350 people who support their families. Today, this company is being sold – sold by the Bank Assets Management Company (BAMC) and sold irresponsibly,” Mesec explained in front of the foundry.
On the same day, Mesec met with the trade union and then with the company’s management. Together, they agreed to urge the Bank Assets Management Company and the government to freeze the sale. They also agreed that he would visit them again soon and present the workers’ buy-out model. No one asked the workers whether they wanted it at all or how it would be implemented, given that many employees had no savings.
“For me, the workers’ buy-out is preferable because all experience from abroad shows that companies organised in this way are the most socially responsible and that workers are happier in them,” he said.
The “timeline” was a problem here, too
And indeed, the sale process was halted. This was to be followed by lectures on workers’ buy-outs. They were supposed to start in the months after Mesec’s visit to the foundry, but they never happened. Then, as the media outlet N1 reports, the Ministry of Solidarity-Based Future was mandated to give lectures on the revolutionary solution to the “workers’ buy-out,” but things got stuck there, too, because the services for “economic democracy” had not yet been set up.
Red Cross packages instead of “workers’ buy-out”
At the end of August, Slovenian Sovereign Holding announced that attempts to find a strategic partner for the Maribor Foundry had failed. The state’s financial support was neither economically viable nor allowed by the rules protecting free economic initiative and competition between providers of goods and services on the European Union market.
The company filed for bankruptcy, and 308 redundancies were made. Many had to turn to the Red Cross for help. August wages have still not been paid and many of the workers have no savings.
Ž. K.
