FIET Trade Union Solidarity Project in Bosnia and Herzegovina

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, where FIET has been running important project activities since the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1996, unions still face difficulties in protecting their members. Most recently, the Office of the High Representative of the International Community (OHR), which wields supreme power in Sarajevo, asked parliament to halt the planned approval of a new labour legislation for the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

FIET has now written to Mr Wolfgang Petritsch, the High Representative, as well as to the European Commission, the International Labour Organisation ILO, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund IMF. In the letters, we  stressed  the urgent need for a labour legislation to be enacted as soon as possible.

- These international institutions cannot speak on behalf of the whole international community if they do not accept a sufficient level of workers' rights to be established, an international FIET Conference in Sarajevo stated on 15 September. In connection with this conference, the president of the Independent Trade Union Confederation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Suleiman Hrle, addressed the Sarajevo press. His demands for a new labour legislation was strongly supported by Jan Furstenborg of FIET and Jürgen Buxbaum, the Sarajevo representative of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions ICFTU.

In the background of the demands for a delay is a World Bank report prepared by a Cornell Law School professor, Stewart Schwab. Repeating the well known thesis of American neo-liberal academics, which were frequently encountered during the whole transition in Central and Eastern Europe, he tries to make a case for a more-or-less unregulated labour environment.

Professor Schwab's recipe, apparently endorsed at some level at the World Bank, is thus well known. Companies should have the right to opt out of collective agreements, firing people should be made very easy, social benefits should be as few as possible, maternity leave down to a minimum and vacations should be cut to fourteen days against the originally proposed three weeks.

It can hardly be seen as serious that the World Bank only now, after more than three years of preparing a new labour law, wakes up and tries to stop the establishment of a normal European standard legislation. The proposals of professor Schwab do not reflect a European reality, nor are they in conformity with the goal of including Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as the rest of the region in the European integration process. What is worst of all, a sell-out of workers' rights would not promote the Dayton peace process, which depends on the engagement of ordinary people in reconstruction and transition.

The trade union movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina will continue their struggle to ensure that workers will be able to enjoy the security and basic conditions of a normal European working life. Everyone knows that the process to prosperity and well-being is a long and difficult one, but equally clear is that for this process to be successful, the right conditions must be created. This is the message which will be put forward by the unions in Sarajevo in the weeks and months to come, and they will not give up until the results are there.

FIET, with its strong engagement in Bosnia and Herzegovina ever since the Dayton peace agreement allowed the reconstruction to begin, will continue to be active in its support of the country's workers and their trade unions. As was said at the August press conference in Sarajevo by the ICFTU and FIET representatives, also the trade union movement is part of the 'International Community' and demand a say about how its policies in Bosnia and Herzegovina are formulated.

The FIET Trade Union Solidarity Project in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Our e-mail address is: jan_furstenborg@fiet.org