Amongst the 140 delegates in the Council of Nationalities of the Fe-deral Assembly there is not a single worker, while in the entire As-sembly there are only four workers, and they are in the Economic Council. Amongst the 2,400 delegates to the Congress of Self-manag-ers in Sarajevo there were only 80 workers. It follows clearly from all this that the representation of workers in the centers of social power is weak or non-existent; the workers’ structures have no social power.
It is elear, on the other hand, that the numerical representation of workers in various centers of social power need not indicate the ex-tent to which those centers truły represent the workers’ interests. Cer-tain data concerning the life of workers are morę meaningful in that respect. If we consider that the average income per-head of the po-pulation has risen in Yugoslavia to almost 600 dollars annually, then there is absolutely no doubt that, from this point of view, the standard of life of Yugoslav workers has notably improved in relation to any previous period during the development of our society. However, a morę exact analysis would give a significantly different picture. The life of a worker depends not only upon his work, but also on the branch of industry to which his factory belongs, the commune in which he lives and on the means of subsistence which on various bases are provided from the factory’s income: it is not at all the same thing to work in the textile or mining industries on the one hand or in the pe-trol and aireraft industries on the other in the center of Ljubljana, or in Kalesija, Prozor or Cazin. According to a Tanjug report of August 1969, in the south of Serbia 20% of the workers’ organizations received a minimum personal income of 35,000 old dinars per person employed, 20% between 45 and 50,000 old dinars, 50% between 60 and 70,000 old dinars, while only 10% of them had an average income of between 80 and 90,000 old dinars. If we leave out of consideration certain extreme and isolated earnings in the entertainment professions and take into account that, while a director earns 600,000 old dinars a month (already not a rare occurrence), a worker, for instance a miner, earns 60,000, then it can very simply be calculated that the director in the course of his four-year mandate earns as much as the worker in the course of his entire 40-year working life. A worker’s chances of getting a fiat are as a rule smali, and a worker’s child, regardless of talent, has nine times fewer chances to become a specialist or a manager. Naturally, the other side of the coin presents a still morę drastic picture: the likelihood is twenty times smaller that the child of a specialist or a manager will become a worker. The number of unemployed workers as evidenced by official statistics fluctuated at about 300,000 in recent years, while the number employed abroad neared the figurę of one million. Finally, while the Yugoslav popula-tion’s nourishment improved qualitatively from the Liberation until 1961, from 1961 until today that quality has stagnated.
Hence, however, much one may speak of Workers’ Self-manag-ement, the workers’ influence hardly extends outside the bounds of the factory. It seems that one of our writers was correct when he said that the Yugoslav working class found itself today in a reservation. He writes: »Workers’ Self-management as the established structure
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