Page 165 - Mellinato, Giulio, and Aleksander Panjek. Eds. 2022. Complex Gateways. Labour and Urban History of Maritime Port Cities: The Northern Adriaticin a Comparative Perspective. Koper: University of Primorska Press.
P. 165
Workers of the Port of Koper and the Economic Reform Period in 1960s Slovenia
The Party commission also harshly criticised Port management for
its treatment of the workers. For example, some workers were fired merely
for taking unauthorized leave from work. The working process was poor-
ly organized, sometimes with two shifts in a single day, lasting as long
as 14 hours or even more. (Petrinja later testified that it was even worse.
In the period of railway construction, some workers even did up to three
back-to-back shifts, usually with no paid overtime.) Bruno Korelič, famil-
iar with the late 1960s and 1970s Koper economy, much later even more
dramatically described the living conditions of the workers in Tomos and
the Port of Koper: ‘The workers felt like slaves and had nothing to lose.
They came to Koper to work to earn money and send money back home to
Bosnia. If their expectations were not met, they had no trouble turning
their backs and going home or rattling.’
The Party report further claimed that the company had invested
only in industrial capacity, but spent less on the wellbeing of its work-
ers. They started to build showers, toilets, and locker rooms only recently,
in the past year. And housing conditions were intolerable (they were lat-
er described at length by Petrinja). The voices of the workers consulted by
the Party commission can be clearly heard through these critiques: ‘The
Commission cannot escape the observation that the worker at the Port
of Koper has to date been neglected.’ But the party went much further in
criticizing the management: not only did the company lack proper stand-
ards for evaluating work, but decisions taken by the worker-led self-man-
agement bodies were curtailed by the director himself. Some conclusions
are particularly scathing: ‘The head of the company had no interest in so-
cial organizations’ [the Party, trade union] active performance, and of-
ten treated them as transmitters of decisions already taken by the senior
management (collegium of professionals) and the director’ (AS 1589/IV, t.
e. 226, a. e. 506, Informacija o vzrokih prekinitve dela; Petrinja 1993, 212;
Petrinja 1999, 6; Hladnik-Milharčič 2015, 11). It is also worth noting that
the cited Party document had been edited post factum by an unknown
reader, maybe even by some functionary from the CC. The harshest crit-
icism regarding the management of the Port had been outlined in pencil
and given quotation marks. For example: the commission’s assessment
on the director’s negligence had been crossed out. A handwritten remark
on the edge of the page reads: ‘Out?’
Končarevič’s letter to Marinc starts with a warning about the poten-
tial disintegration of the Port of Koper. It seems ideas were being floated
165
The Party commission also harshly criticised Port management for
its treatment of the workers. For example, some workers were fired merely
for taking unauthorized leave from work. The working process was poor-
ly organized, sometimes with two shifts in a single day, lasting as long
as 14 hours or even more. (Petrinja later testified that it was even worse.
In the period of railway construction, some workers even did up to three
back-to-back shifts, usually with no paid overtime.) Bruno Korelič, famil-
iar with the late 1960s and 1970s Koper economy, much later even more
dramatically described the living conditions of the workers in Tomos and
the Port of Koper: ‘The workers felt like slaves and had nothing to lose.
They came to Koper to work to earn money and send money back home to
Bosnia. If their expectations were not met, they had no trouble turning
their backs and going home or rattling.’
The Party report further claimed that the company had invested
only in industrial capacity, but spent less on the wellbeing of its work-
ers. They started to build showers, toilets, and locker rooms only recently,
in the past year. And housing conditions were intolerable (they were lat-
er described at length by Petrinja). The voices of the workers consulted by
the Party commission can be clearly heard through these critiques: ‘The
Commission cannot escape the observation that the worker at the Port
of Koper has to date been neglected.’ But the party went much further in
criticizing the management: not only did the company lack proper stand-
ards for evaluating work, but decisions taken by the worker-led self-man-
agement bodies were curtailed by the director himself. Some conclusions
are particularly scathing: ‘The head of the company had no interest in so-
cial organizations’ [the Party, trade union] active performance, and of-
ten treated them as transmitters of decisions already taken by the senior
management (collegium of professionals) and the director’ (AS 1589/IV, t.
e. 226, a. e. 506, Informacija o vzrokih prekinitve dela; Petrinja 1993, 212;
Petrinja 1999, 6; Hladnik-Milharčič 2015, 11). It is also worth noting that
the cited Party document had been edited post factum by an unknown
reader, maybe even by some functionary from the CC. The harshest crit-
icism regarding the management of the Port had been outlined in pencil
and given quotation marks. For example: the commission’s assessment
on the director’s negligence had been crossed out. A handwritten remark
on the edge of the page reads: ‘Out?’
Končarevič’s letter to Marinc starts with a warning about the poten-
tial disintegration of the Port of Koper. It seems ideas were being floated
165
