Government’s Failures Put Over on Common People’s Shoulders :: Charter'97 :: News

Belarusian industrial trade unions are opposed to the idea of laying the burden of government’s mistakes on the shoulders of common workers, reads the special statement of the country’s leading industrial trade unions, forwarded to the government over the deterioration of the social-economic state of affairs in the country: both of the workers from industrial sector of economy and the whole population in general.

The document states that at the moment Belarus takes the lead among all CIS countries according to the inflation rate. “Contrary to the government’s assurances that prices on public utilities won’t rise till the end of 2002, the cost of electric energy in November soared by more than 57%, while gas became 65% costlier,” – say the authors of the statement: “There continued growth of tariffs on other types of public and household utilities and public transportation fees.”

Rise in prices and tariffs in Belarus “isn’t accompanied by the concomitant growth of salaries, while an insignificant leap in the size of pensions doesn’t cover pensioners’ expenditures on public utilities”. “So, one could derive a conclusion that the authorities are simply unable to solve the emerging problems in other ways, except extorting money from their own citizens,” – reads the text of the statement.

The document’s authors assume that in order to ensure decent living standard in Belarus and sustainable economic development they first of all need to “provide economic freedom in the country”. According to them, “it is vital to carry out a series of measures on drawing investments into the economy and easing the taxation burden”.