Aliaksandr Jarashuk: To make vagrants work, USSR has to be brought back to Belarus

With official unemployment level at 22 thousand people, Belarusan authorities are aiming at introducing some 4 hundred thousand people to the official labor. But what for?

Inspirited by yet another hardly explainable impulse, Belarusan authorities decided to eradicate something that hasn’t been officially recognized in our country – vagrancy. Aliaksandr Lukashenka counted 4 hundred thousand idlers and loafers and suggested making them work. It is unclear how it will be done. Such system of measures has to be elaborated before January 1 2015. The Ministry of Internal Affairs also intends to re-introduce vagrancy as administrative offense term and devise punishment for it.

“You have to use any means that we have and know how to apply to make these people work!” said Aliaksandr Lukashenka on October 20.

“EuroBelarus” Information Service asked Aliaksandr Jarashuk, the head of the Belarusian Congress of Democratic Trade Unions to comment on this initiative of the regime.

- May this fight on vagrancy be successful and who needs that?

- The authorities will make a big fuss out of it, but achieve nothing. To make all vagrants work, USSR has to be brought back to the territory of Belarus. It is fairly present in our country; however, we also adopt all changes of the modern world. Lukashenka makes such statements because he is hopelessly stuck in the good old Soviet past. It is this past that serves as a measure of reality for him and the reason why he pursues the correspondent policy. “Vagrants”, “in the name of revolution” – these words are like passwords, and need no further explanation. This rhetoric also demonstrates that person is unaware of democratic principles. A democratic open society presupposes that a man is a master of his fate. The unemployed are present even in the most economically developed countries, but no one calls them vagrants.

- By the way, there are almost no unemployed in Belarus.

- Statistics says that we have 22 thousand unemployed, and out of nowhere some more 4 hundred thousand vagrants appeared. I believe that the way it was counted was the following: the number of those officially employed and working migrants was subtracted from the economically active population total, which made right 4 hundred thousand people who are not equipped.

- They aren’t working for real, are they?

- Many of them work, but don’t advertise that. A lot of them keep their work record card in one place but work in a different one. A lot of them have 2-3 jobs at a time to make both ends meet. Thus, the situation for everyone is different and one decision cannot be applied to the fates of hundreds of thousands of people.

Besides, what job placement Aliaksandr Lukashenka is going to arrange, if we have overabundance of labor force? Some enterprises switch to a four-day and three-day working regimes.

It is very brave to name everyone who is officially unemployed vagrants. Instead of making them work we should open the country and liberalize the economy.

- But the fuss cannot be about caring for people’s job placement, can it? The reason for that is that there is little money in the budget and the authorities want to cut down the expenses by ceasing to support the unemployed.

- To stop giving out goods for free, we need to switch to the market economy, which presupposes that people would have more opportunities to earn money so as to lessen protectionism on the part of the government. But what goods could have made 4 hundred thousand people abstain from work, and how it would be possible to count and isolate these goods? There is nothing feasible that can work effectively unless the society is made as sterile as it was back in the USSR: to close the borders, stop working migration, and so on. It is impossible. So there will be a lot of fuss, but little would be done. It is only that this archaic thinking makes me feel sad.