Andrej Stryzhak: Increasing salaries will not keep workers in country

People cannot fulfill themselves in Belarus, even if they learnt something abroad.

This is how a coordinator of the youth network of the Radio Electronic Industry’s trade union (REI) Andrej Stryzhak commented for the charter97.org web-site on the statement by the Minister of Labour who had claimed that Belarusians’ going to work abroad had positive consequences.

“It is curious, how exactly labour migration directly helps the Belarusian economy? From the point of view that people, who acquire certain new skills and knowledge of how to work with some new technologies abroad, this may be true. But to face the truth, most of the labour migrants are people, who work in construction and deal with fairly low-qualification types of work. The only thing I can agree with is that it is a specific kind of export in services, which allows bringing cash foreign currency to Belarus”, - the trade union activist believes.

At the same time he highlighted that the families of such people still remain in the country and the money that they bring are spent here.

“It appears that this is just the export of working hands to Russia, Poland or whatnot. But, of course, the situation, in which the Belarusian labour market is unable of offering an adequate salary here, brings about social tension. It is not acceptable that a family has to exist in such a condition that the father works somewhere in Russia, the wife lives without the husband, and the children grow up without the father”, - Andrej Stryzhak noted.

He is convinced that this is unacceptable.

“It happened a lot in history when, say, in Poland or other countries that went through transformations there was devastation for a certain period, because state enterprises had already fallen apart, and private ones did not yet emerge. People have nowhere to work so they left. It is good if the process will be arranged as follows: people, who leave, earns money, come back and start their own enterprise and use the skills that they acquired abroad. But in reality it turns out that people cannot fulfill themselves in Belarus even if they have learnt something abroad. When they come back and want to start a private enterprise, they face a bunch of problems immediately and gradually realize that it would be more profitable to drop everything here and leave again. This potential, unfortunately, is not used”, - the activist added.

He believes that simple salary increase will not keep worker in the country.

“If salaries grow without the quality growth of the product that we produce, then there are two options: either it will be done artificially and dotation will be required from the budget, or it should be arranged for the enterprises to work in completely market conditions. In our semi-socialism it is currently impossible”, - Andrej Stryzhak is convinced.

We would remind that several days ago the deputy Minister of Labour and Social Security Piotr Hrushnik confirmed that the Belarusians, who did not officially work in the country, would be required to pay fully for the social services subsidized by the state – public transport, utilities, medicine. This time, though, he saw “certain positive consequences” in Belarusians’ temporarily going to work abroad.