Economy will deal the final blow to Lukashenka’s regime

Belarus is going to face an increase of discontent among worker and new labor conflicts.

The chairman of the Belarusian Congress of Democratic Trade Unions, vice-president of the International Trade Union Confederation, the Administrative council of the World Labor Organization member, Aliaksandr Yarashuk said that commenting on the news about the strike attitudes at a number of Belarusian enterprises, regnum.ru reports.

“A distinctive feature of the situation in the sphere of social and labor relations in the current year is that conflicts between workers and enterprise administrations happen regularly. And they happen in different regions, at different enterprises from various branches of the economy. Only that is an evidence of these conflicts not being a mere coincidence and the Belarusian authorities will have to learn to leave with this for them very unpleasant phenomenon”, - Yarashuk told.

The leader of the Belarusian independent trade unions thinks that such a course of events took place because the country’s leadership exercises a mistaken economic strategy. Lack of a possibility to provide a decent level of income for the workers characterizes the “Belarusian model of social and economic development” in the best way.

“Unreformed, not modernized Belarusian economy is unable to provide the salary level, which would allow the workers of many enterprises to simply make both ends meet. And in Polatsk, in the the Minsk hospital #2 as well as it was before at a number of enterprises in Grodno, Pinsk, Babruisk, Mikashevichy and other cities the workers had to bring themselves to protests as they received pay checks of 1,5-2 million Belarusian rubbles (around 200-250 USDs)”, - Yarashuk pointed out.

“The Belarusian authorities in their stubbornness to focus on the command-administrative economy has been consecutively approaching the current situation. I’d like to make a prediction: they has no single chance of solving the problem of salary. To be precise, they would have gotten the chance, if it had guts for economic liberalization. But this is not happening and will not happen as economic liberalization will inevitable bring political liberalization to the agenda. And this is, as we noted earlier, a huge, if not a deadly risk for the incumbent political regime’s existence” , - the Union’s leader said.

“The current Belarus’ leadership prefers to do nothing and again hopes to everything to resolve by itself, Russian assistance would come, some loans could be found, and it’ll become possible to fix the economic troubles that appeared and to improve the workers’ pay rate. But this will not happen”, - Yarashuk noted.

The Union leader thinks that there’s a social discontent growing in Belarus, but these processes are developing progressively, without any abrupt surges in mass protest actions. Particularly the Union leader said: “Probably, the discontent attitudes among workers would not lead to mass protest actions, a social outburst, but they would undoubtedly become one of the factors for the inevitable changes in the country. The Belarusian authorities once again proved, that the main enemy, whom none undemocratic authoritarian regime can’t defeat, is the regime itself, its economic policy. The economy is preparing the resignation of the ruling Belarusian regime from the arena of the history. And no repressions, no reprisals with the discontent workers will help with that”.