Workers and Middle Class Cultures of Protest in Romania

Adrian Deoancă

Two sets of protests took place in early 2017 Romania: one mobilized the
middle classes against corruption, the other, railroaders for labor rights. Throughout
January and February hundreds of thousands of urban white-collar professionals took
to the streets against a bill that, had it not been repealed eventually, would have
helped many politicians escape prison sentences or ongoing investigations. On March
22, after the protests had cooled down, a part of railroaders went on a spontaneous
strike, halting trains nationwide to protest wages, work conditions, and their
diminished rights. Middle class demonstrations benefitted from massive support.
Opposition politicians, corporate executives, journalists and public intellectuals, NGO
workers, and Western embassies took part in the protests or voiced their support.
International media hailed the demonstrations as a ¨beacon¨ for democracy in Europe,
while national outlets branded them an ¨ethical¨ or ¨moral¨ revolution. Compared to
such lush showers of support and admiration, railroaders’ mobilization seemed like a
mere footnote. Besides lacking support from politicians and from their labor
representatives, whom they accuse of being in cahoots with the administration,
strikers also got lambasted by the media. Reports vilified them for creating ¨chaos¨
and delays, and privileged angry passengers over railroaders’ grievances. Inimical as
it was, this was the warmest coverage the railroaders received this year. No cameras
were on sight at the previous two protests when a few hundred of them aired their
grievances in front of the Ministry of Transportation.
The two instances of class-based public mobilization seem to have little in
common. One was massive numerically, had public support, and yielded results, the
other was small, garnered no public sympathy, and changed nothing. Together, they
tell a story of unequal political and economic agency in a neoliberal environment that
glorifies business, the middle classes and anti-corruption over labor, the working
classes, and social welfare. Two quotes are revelatory of the unequal prestige of class
demands. In an op-ed for the New York Times, a former social-democratic
presidential hopeful described anti-corruption protestors as ¨young, urban, college-
educated people with well-paid jobs at multinational corporations and banks,¨ not ¨the
blue-collar, rural, anti-globalization disgruntled.¨ In a similar vein, a Romanian
journalist commended taking to the streets ¨not to demand salaries and pensions, but
to defend ideas of righteousness, justice, honesty, and truth.¨ From the stand point of
neoliberal hegemonic doxa, the middle classes appear virtuous, independent, agents of
social and moral change. Workers and state employees emerge as the opposite:
morally corrupt, outdated in mentality, un-meritocratic mendicants dependent on state
alms. The voices of the former are glorified, the demands of the latter, ignored.
Yet unlike the middle class protestors’ grand claims pertaining to atemporal
principles like democracy, good governance, and political and social morality,
railroaders’ demands were modest in scope and scale, although high in urgency. ¨We
are not asking for increased wages, we only want our rights back,¨ cried out Nina, a
signalwoman, during a protest. A skilled laborer who has been working for the rails
for over thirty years, Nina makes around 350 euro/month, despite working long hours
and doing unpaid overtime in a position of high responsibility. Nonetheless, she earns
a bit more than most of her railroad peers, a majority of them working on minimum
wage. ¨We used to be respected,¨ says Ilie, a shunter who makes minimum wage,
frustration in his voice. ¨We’re nothing but rags now¨.
When talking about being respected, Ilie refers to state socialism and the
decade following its collapse, when railroaders were still among the aristocracy of
industrial skilled laborers. A job with the rails brought good money, job stability,
nearly certain promotion based on seniority and skill, and great prestige. It all
changed starting with 1998, with the break-up of the National Railways Company
(CFR) into a multitude of s state-owned but financially and managerially independent
firms (infrastructure, passengers, freight, repair, etc.). The move was undertaken by
the right-wing government of the time despite staunch opposition from the trade
unions, with advice from an American audit company, under pressures from the IMF
and the World Bank.
The break-up, intended to render the system ¨efficient¨ impacted the workers
in several ways. First, it produced blatant inequalities both between and within the
newly emerged firms. It led to the substantial bloating of well-paid administration
positions and a correlative reduction of working jobs through multiple waves of
layoffs. At the same time it placed workers who used to work together on different
wage schemes: some make a decent living, while others doing the same job can barely
make ends meet. Secondly, the break-up threatened the very sustenance and
competitivity of the newly emerged firms, and thus workers’ livelihood. Running on
tight budgets, company managers are unable to maintain and modernize infrastructure
and machines, or to buy spare parts or even tools. Thirdly, it fragmented the power of
trade unions. Railroaders are represented by different trade unions, sometimes with
conflicting interests. Yearly collective agreements expire on different dates for each
of the branches, thus bargaining procedures do not coincide temporally. This provides
little incentives for solidarity among different trade unions and between workers
employed by different firms.
Even during such bargaining, workers complain that they are not represented
adequately. Since 2011, under a decision by a social-democrat secretary of
transportation, rail union leaders have turned into so-called ¨social relations experts.¨
Under this new title, union leaders leave their working jobs during their tenure and
move into offices in the Ministry of Transportation building, benefitting from
substantial financial bonuses on top of their salaries and other privileges (such as fuel
subsidies). Given that union leaders are closer to the administration than to workers,
in terms of both physical proximity and financial interests, there is little wonder then
that railroaders who participated in the 2017 strike organized themselves through
social media, independently of trade union structures, and number among their
demands the resignation of union leaders and the abolition of ¨social relations
experts¨.
Fragmented in terms of organization, funding, and representation railroaders
could produce only meek, inefficient opposition to changes in legislation and in
collective agreements, which rendered them even poorer and more vulnerable. In
2001, for instance, most of them lost a special provision in their contracts that enabled
them to retire with a full pension provided they had worked for 35 years, even without
reaching the legal retirement age. ¨Only someone who never worked for the railroads
can think that you can do this job until you’re sixty-five,¨ a mechanic once told me.
A decade later, they lost another crucial privilege, namely the so-called ¨K
factor¨, part of the algorithm used to calculate railroaders’ wages. While it was
emplaced, the K-factor ensured that wages would grow proportionally with each hike
in the minimum wage. Since this provision was taken away, the minimum wage has
increased to 320 euros, but railroaders’ salaries are still calculated in relation to the
minimum wage in 2011, namely 142 euros. Besides impacting the workers materially,
the absence of the said factor also has symbolic implications for workers’ self value.
In the repair shop where I do my fieldwork, George, a recently hired entry-level
electrician earns the same amount with his colleague Fane, although the latter has a
higher position, and nearly ten years of skilled labor experience. George’s salary is
only 50 euros lower than Dumitru’s, the workshop’s superstar repairman, who counts
31 years on the job. For the more experienced workers like Dumitru and Fane, this
situation is unbearably frustrating and disrespectful. As Fane put it, shortly before
quitting the job to try his luck as gastarbeiter in Switzerland, ¨we’re now paid like
unskilled workers, they turned us all into janitors.¨
Railroaders’ problems do not end here. In 2013, the social-democratic
government led by Victor Ponta, self-declared ¨the most pro-business prime minister
in Europe,¨ passed a bill that conditioned wage increase in public companies on the
company’s profit, and on workers reaching certain criteria of performance. For many
railroaders, this means not getting a raise anytime in the near future. The locomotive
repairmen whom I observe work for SCRL, a firm that used to be part of the National
Rail Passenger Company (CFR Călători), but is now independent. SCRL’s main client
remains CFR Călători, and it is financially dependent on the latter’s payments. Since
the client hasn’t been doing well it hasn’t been able to honor its debts to SCRL, which
sent the repair firm in a state of insolvency. In such a situation, workers’ predicament
deepened. On the one hand, the insolvency of their employer means that can’t
contract any personal loans whatsoever. On the other hand, no matter how hard they
might work, they still can’ hope for a raise until the firm becomes solvent. Repairmen
also find it practically impossible to be competitive in their work anyways due to lack
of spare parts, tools, and personnel. In this situation workers have to employ, most of
the time, incredibly ingenious improvised solutions or to fashion functional spare
parts out of old, defected ones. As they have to repair aging machines and make them
work, their ¨stitching¨ becomes more and more difficult and less sustainable. Not only
because they lack the parts and the tools, but also because they are much fewer than
they used to be. Many experience workers have retired, others, like Fane, had quit,
and there is a scarcity of laborers to replace them: technical schools do not produce
locomotive electricians any longer, and few skilled workers would accept a minimum
wage job in an insolvent firm.
Middle classes in Romania have the unique privilege of being able to demand
moral transformations rather than battle for their immediate material needs. The
changes they propose however, can only function in a long temporal timeframe. Like
in trickle down economics, moral revolutions produce social welfare, if they produce
it at all, sometime in the undetermined future. Living on minimum wage, stripped of
respect, and rendered impotent in labor and in mobilization by the same postsocialist
market processes that lend the middle classes their glory, railroaders are justifiably
sick of waiting.