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Hungarian workfare - a new army of slave labour

carlr
29th June 2011 at 06:38
1 comment

The Hungarian government has announced a new Hungarian Work Plan aimed at increasing the low employment rate in Hungary. As a post-communist country, subjected to Shock Therapy in the 1990s, some areas of Hungary have suffered unemployment rates over 40% continually over the last 20 years. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-01-24-rowlands-en.html

The package reduces employers’ payroll taxes and aims to replace welfare projects with public works projects. The government is attacking the rights of all employees and restoring a neo-feudal system whereby the current minimal levels of workplace of protection will be further reduced.

After 90 days of unemployment insurance, all welfare payment will be stopped to claimants. They will then need to enroll in public works programmes; and be assigned work such as cleaning sewers, building dams or stadiums. This will be done under police supervision. It is said that the conscripts will work only half-time, for less money than the minimum wage. If the work is more than six hours from the conscript’s residence, they will be given a trailer to sleep in, near the site.

These plans may represent the ultimate logic of the current capitalist trends across Europe - labour camps, guarded by the police; with the apparent blessing of the incompetents and scoundrels currently in charge of the European Union.

Tags: international solidarity hungary trades unions (1)

Comments

on 21st July 2011 at 13:20, Marie Lynam said:

Hello Carlr

Well done your article on Hungary. The process in that country must be pretty representative of what happens - in one way or the other - to all the Eastern European Workers States. The latter have not progressed politically, over the years, with the sufficient Marxism to foresee this turn of events.
But Trotsky did. In his view, the triumph of the USSR in the 2nd World War was not a pre-determined given. If the USSR was over-run, he said, it would plunge it into barbarism. But he also said that the forces existed in the world, and the contradictions of capitalism were too terminal, to work wholeheartedly for the triumph of the USSR. If the USSR triumphed, he said, the world revolution would rise again. Which it did, since some 10 new Workers States appeared in Eastern Europe, taking half of Germany.
It was only the lack of marxist leadership in the Communist movement that handed much of these gains back to capitalism. Utterly and criminally unnecessarily.

The revolution in Hungary was too incomplete. The Red Army came in - and a little like the armies of Napoleon (who already wanted to become emperor), the masses rose to finish the capitalists and nazis. But it is not enough to remove the barbarians, one must build society, and this cannot be done without consciousness. Consciousness being Marxism.

The liberation of hungary now passes through the organisation of the proletariat across boundaries, all over Europe. This cannot be done without divorcing the workers leaderships from their cosy alliance with the corporations, where the national workers leaders take the side of their national bourgeoisies. In other words, the unification of the workers movement in Europe, being utterly necessary and unavoidable, brings the class struggle all the way down into the Trade Unions and the workers organisations in the workplaces.
Trade Union democracy is a phrase that does not nearly describe what is required. The workers must take control in their Unions, and cast aside the chauvinist workers leaders. The latter are not chauvinist because of backwardness, but because this is how they support the bosses in their own companies. Chauvinism may not always be of the British sort. It can simply be of the sort that always supports the boss who pays the wages, as he (or she) competes with other bosses further afield.
Well done comrade, tell us more about Hungary.
Marie Lynam