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text by:
Nebojša Milikić [Cultural Centre Rex, Belgrade]
project
realised by: Branimir Stojanović, Vladimir Marković, Nebojša
Milikić and Dragoljub Janeš
“… But workers keep going to
the factory, and keep getting a salary despite the fact that there is no work
for them!”
“… What do you mean there is no work for them? Why do they
go there if they don’t work?”
“… Don’t know…. I suppose they just keep the social
contract alive that way…”
“Well, that is what they work at then, their job is to
guard the social contract!”
(Dialogue between Branimir Stojanović and a syndicate official at the
presentation of the survey in Resource Centre Bor)
The
idea for a survey among workers in the town of Bor arose in the following
circumstances: the Resource Center Bor [1] was in the process of changing
directors and the profiling of a new program. The plan was to initiate certain
activities, appropriate for the Resource Center and the overall situation in
the local community – town, over a period of two months (January-February
2003). The authors of the project decided to implement a potentially productive
polling method, designed on the basis of results of several years of research
among groups of workers by the French sociologist, Sylvain Lazarus [2], to find
out about the Bor workers' opinion of the life they were living, viewed through
terminology employed in their working and living conjuncture. The survey was
conceived by Branimir Stojanović, philosopher, who recommended that Lazarus' text be used,
Vladimir Marković,
sociologist, Nebojša Milikić, cultural worker, with the contribution of Dragoljub Janeš,
engineer, and a group of associates, who took part in the interviewing: Ivan
Radenković, Gordana Đorđević, Javorka Đurić, Vladimir
Đorđević, Nenad Janeš and Jasmina Orlić. [3] The project was carried out with the
technical and organisational assistance of the Resource Center Bor.
In an
indirect manner, the poll sought the answer to the following question: is there
a way out of the degrading situation the entire town is in, which would not
envisage re-enacting the "Full Monty" movie? In a certain way, the
workers of Bor are hostage to their occupations and the town they live in: the
business and economic infrastructure of the town that developed at the time
when the mine and the accompanying industry were operating in full swing cannot
be changed without a kind of social and cultural breakdown, which nobody
desires, and, due to the extremely low prices of housing facilities, none of
them can sell their apartments and move to another town... the method of the
"Lazarus" poll aimed at enabling these people to express their views
about their life at present and to form (prescribe) the rules for its political
recognition: there is the ballast of the past, and an uncertain future, but no
one can find their way in the current set of circumstances if they deal only
with these two categories. Like in a prison, the most important and most difficult
question is how to get through each current day.
The survey
was approached in a way that was to detect the creative proposition of the
workers/inhabitants of the town, which, like any mining colony, is organised
around the concept that the majority of the population participates in the
exploitation and processing of ore. Many answers in many polls equated the
state of the workers and the mining basin with the state of the town. This
fateful connection seems to irritate generations of young people in Bor; so
many of them have developed a specific culturological resistance to this image:
so-called anti-Borism (I heard this expression from the young people in the
town). And so, one should bear in mind that the average age of the respondents
is around 40, and that they most probably belong to the last/youngest
generation among those who do not have an a priori negative opinion
about living in the town. And, this life is changing in every aspect –
economic, environmental and social. The well-developed urban space along the
town's seven Kilometres (the quarters of Bor are named according to their
distance from the former mine shaft: Second Kilometre, Fourth Kilometre and at
the last, Seventh Kilometre is – the cemetery) is no longer enveloped in the
poisonous fumes from the smelting plant. An absurd fact is that one of the
conditions for Bor to become a city was for the mine to be shut down (the
impression of an artist from Belgrade after his first visit to Bor). And while
the entire mining and smelting complex is being viewed as an aging family
member, who has worked to bring up the entire family and now, exhausted, is
waiting for an infusion or execution, the question of the right to employment
and human dignity are sinking into the depressing two-dimensional landscape of
employment-survival, devoid of any chronological perspective.
We must ask
ourselves which coordinate system lacks this perspective? The bare
cause-and-effect relationship between the chances for the survival of the
town's population – the workers of the Mining and Smelting Basin – and the
mercy of the state, raises the question of elementary solidarity and even of
the meaning of a new political concept of the broader social community in the
process of privatisation and the sale of ruined socially-owned property at
dumping prices. The brutal truth about the diminishing percentage of copper in
the ore simply cannot be swallowed – it is incomprehensible because of the
consequential derailment of an entire working class settlement from the tracks
of its existence. In this context, the important question, raised through
information collected by this survey, is: who can listen and hear the answers?
One also
cannot help overhearing some other voices in the town of Bor, for instance:
"...the combine is being deliberately ruined in order to sell it at a
dumping price... the engineers at the mine say there is still enough copper and
that it could even be extracted from the already processed ore, i.e.
slag..." Regardless of whether there are any grounds in this argument, the
way things are now the symbolic slag heaps, towering over Bor, will sooner
become a desert location or moonscape for shooting movies than a new source of
raw materials for the Bor Mining and Smelting Basin. There would also be no lack
of extras for mass scenes, because that is what the thousands of former
self-managed workers are becoming, more or less willingly, after having been
cajoled for 30 years, by the strategies of technocrats, the national-cultural
and war elite and, ultimately, by all-out war, that they do not know what is
good for them.
The results
of the survey were commented in the following texts: "Thinking the
Situation in the Combine" by Vladimir Marković, sociologist, and "A Worker without
Qualities" by Jelena Đorđević, psychologist. The text that was to
clarify the situation over the diminishing quantities of copper in the ore,
"Since There Was No Copper in the Ore" was written by Dragoljub
Janeš, an engineer and one of the co-authors of the project. We hope these contributions
will help in further research and in analyses of the problems they are dealing
with. [6]
The CD is
released, which contains audio recordings of all interviews and two versions of
transcripts (only in Serbian so far) of the responses: those transcribed by the
people, who performed the survey and those transcribed subsequently, by the
author of this text. There are differences between the two transcriptions, so
either of the versions may be consulted in cases where the voice of the
interviewed person is less distinct. The answers have been transcribed in the
authentic, grammatically unedited manner of speech, in order to be available as
such for the possible linguistic or psychological research – let us just
mention that symptomatic errors of speech occasionally appear in the
pronunciation of the words "job", "employment", etc.
The audio
recordings can serve as a basis for further conclusions about the ranges of
this survey. Some of the pollsters certainly used an excessively official
approach, maintaining an air of aloofness with the people they interviewed;
others conducted very spontaneous conversations, while some were encouraging,
perhaps even suggesting the replies. Some of the recordings lead one to
conclude that the participants were reading replies written beforehand. In any
case, the texts of the interviews would not be completely understandable
without the audio recordings – the dramatic charge of some of the conversations, the pauses, hesitations,
tone of voice etc provide data that is as valuable as their contents.
We thank
all the participants, the pollsters, the respondents, the officials of the Bor
Mining and Smelting Basin, and the staff of the Resource Center Bor. [7]
The survey project was made possible by financial support
from the Swedish Helsinki Committee for Human Rights.
1. The Resource Center Bor is an NGO founded by Swedish
Helsinki Committee for Human Rights to logistically support
human-rights-oriented activities in local community, see more at www.rcbor.org.yu.
2. Sylvain Lazarus, 2001
3. All interviews were realised inside the combine and by
the local cooperators of the project, the average length of interviews being
5-10 minutes. Since no workers were engaged into realisation of this survey, it
could hardly be qualified as co-research or participative inquiry (such as the
"Call Centre Inquiry" prepared by the Kolinko collective [See note 4]
or "participation observational method", as carried out by the
investigation team of "The unemployed persons of Marienthal" [See
note 5]). Questions were divided in four sets (resembling Lazarus' division to
descriptive and "prescriptive" questions), and were prescriptive
opportunity to offer another possibility of interpretation of ideological and
economical categories like transition, privatisation, redundancy payment etc...
(we believe that by the end of the May 2006, we could have several interviews
translated and uploaded to the web-site of Resource Centre Bor.)
4. Kolinko, 2002
5. Marie, Jahoda et al., 1975
6. All texts
are translated to English and can be accessed at www.rcbor.org.yu/anketa/tekst.htm
7. We also thank to all people that appeared at the presentation
of this project in Resource Centre Bor in January 2005, which was an
unsuccessful attempt to give the results of the project back to the workers.
Lazarus, Sylvain, Anthropologie ouvričre
et enquętes d'usine: état des lieux et problématique, Ethnologie française,
XXXI, 2001, 3, pp. 389-400.
Kolinko-book: Hotlines – Call Centre
Inquiry | communism (9/2002).
Jahoda, Marie, Lazarsfeld, F. Paul, Zeisel, Hans, The
Unemployed Persons of Marienthal: A sociographical analysis of the effects of
long-continuous unemployment, Edition Suhrkamp, 1975.