Postmen are appointed directors of Kyiv factories - protest of Bolshevik workers
“The entire industry of Ukraine has been destroyed by your hands,” - under such slogans, workers of the Kyiv plant “Bolshevik”, who were supported by Kyiv communists and Komsomol members, went to a protest rally under the State Property Fund, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
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“The new management of the plant wants to fire a number of qualified management workers, that is, to decapitate the plant,” Nikolai Goncharenko, head of the plant’s marketing department, told the agency’s correspondent about the reasons for the rally. – And these are specialists who have worked for 40 years. Now people come to us who have neither mechanical engineering nor engineering education. From Ukrposhta, for example. It's funny to you, but not so much to us, because people cannot distinguish one equipment from another. And we want wages to be received through production, and not through rent.”
The plant, famous in Soviet times and considered one of the flagships of Soviet mechanical engineering, is today going through probably the most difficult period in its more than 130-year history and has actually stopped.
It is worth noting that the enterprise currently appears on the list of objects not subject to privatization, although officials have learned to circumvent this ban.
“Yes, the plant is prohibited from privatization, but today we see the so-called quiet privatization,” noted the leader of the Kyiv Komsomol members Nikolai Plitsyn, who once worked at Bolshevik as a foundry worker. – For the past 10 years, the Cabinet of Ministers has been withdrawing workshops from the plant’s stock and thus selling them. We saw how the Bolshevik shopping center bought its premises; on the other hand, office buildings were built on the territory of the plant. About 40 percent of the plant has been sold compared to what it was during Soviet times.”
In turn, the plant workers say that they have practically no work.
“People walk from corner to corner, sweeping,” the workers say. – Machine operators were turned into janitors. They pay the tariff rate for a part-time work week.”
“I am a fifth-class boring and turner, but I walk and sweep the same thing,” one of the protest participants was indignant. – I also chop down trees and bushes. And he worked at the plant for almost 40 years.”
Workers blame this situation on the State Property Fund, where management regularly changes. In the last year alone, they say, five directors have been replaced.
Despite the peaceful nature of the action, buses with National Guard soldiers were brought near the SPFU just in case.
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