Self-employment — Comanche territory

SANTIAGO DE CUBA — Luis Ángel Pérez is 24, has a girlfriend, a cell phone and a hairstyle that requires permanent gel. He’s a fan of the Barcelona soccer team and reveres its star player, Lionel Messi.

Luis Ángel likes partying and drinking beer. He’s asthmatic and suffers a rare allergy that reaches crisis point four times a year, lasting usually 25 to 30 days.

He mocks the triumphalism that pervades the National Television prime-time news and often criticizes the Cuban economic system. He has never read a book, though he always buys them at the annual Book Fair (he has trouble concentrating.)

One of the things that bother him the most is his meager salary; he thinks that his employer’s underpaying him. So, a couple of months ago, he gave his life a turn: he went to work in a private restaurant.

The idea of working in the self-employment sector occurred to him when he heard that one of the city’s swankiest restaurants was looking for a supplies buyer and storage-room manager. The job paid 20 convertible pesos a week [US$20] plus an occasional bonus. All it required was hard work, that was all.

Before he started, Luis Ángel asked why the previous worker had resigned and was told that he didn’t like to work. Well, Luis didn’t thing that the work was hard, so he took the job.

He figured out the finances. He could depend less on cell-phone recharges from abroad or other remittances; he could buy new shoes that he could himself pick; he could take his girlfriend on outings, and could travel in taxis without having to stand in the sun at a corner, waiting for an infrequent bus.

At first, he was happy to think that in a week he could earn what his current job couldn’t provide in a month. He asked his boss for a two-month unpaid leave, saying that he needed to take care of his allergy and tried out the restaurant job.

“I worked 12 or 13 hours a day, every day, no break, even Sundays,” Luis Ángel recalls. “I had no time to go out and even less to do house work, I came home so tired.”

On the other hand, working for the government as a hospital janitor (which he did), he had a very flexible schedule and a very understanding boss, who not only empathized with his escapades but also helped him create excuses in case of an auditing.

Luis then began to experience a stress he had never felt before, one that history books describe as the stress of workers before the 1959 Revolution: the fear of dismissal.

“If I failed to show up at the restaurant, even for good reason, they’d kick me out and replace me without prior warning,” he said.

Let me explain the situation this way. In a state-run business, the boss is not pressured by competition or the money worries that beset a private entrepreneur. And the private entrepreneur does not offer the labor rights that protect the worker, such as the eight-hour day or legal defense in case of employer abuse, gains made by the labor movement in Cuba and more advanced societies.

In the triad formed by the Self-Employed Proprietor, the Government, and the Worker, the weakest link is the Worker — the least protected economic actor. And that’s what Cuban socialism is currently trying to correct through its “actualization” or updating process.

The eight-hour day appears in the Labor Code approved in 2014 but not in the regulations for non-state (private) work, although the law says that employer and employee must sign a contract that outlines the requirements for personal safety, days off, salary, work hours and other provisos that both parties agree upon.

After several weeks, Luis Ángel quit his restaurant job and returned to the hospital, where he earned four times less. Asked why, he answered: “I needed freedom and time. I am young. That job was brutal, pure capitalism.”

Luis Ángel’s case is not rare. Thousands of self-employed workers don’t sign contracts, and — if they do — they abide by the conditions of the employer/proprietor, especially if the kind of work required doesn’t need special training or knowledge.

A worker like Luis Ángel can be used and tossed. Perhaps that condition weakens the rights of that workforce, which does not work long enough or is not intellectually prepared to build up a body of rights.

Let us remember that most of the highly-qualified trades, whose practitioners could launch the debate, are currently not included or permitted in the universe of Cuban self-employment.

According to Luis Ángel, being meticulous about heeding the contract, or demanding fewer hours of work might force the proprietor to create more jobs (two storage-room managers) and consequently pay more taxes. That might prompt the proprietor to send him packing, since workers like Luis Ángel are available everywhere.

An employee’s defenselessness is the result of the lack of a union and union leader. But, to the unions, which have long been present in the state-run businesses, the private sector is Comanche territory they have been unable to enter, where contempt and pragmatism have resisted policy and the law of the jungle rules unchecked.

In the union meetings held in the city of Santiago de Cuba in 2014, the union offered to mediate between private businesses and institutions like the government, the ONAT (National Office for Tax Management), Physical Planning, the MINSAP (Ministry of Public Health) and the Ministry of Labor.

But those meetings — which were scarcely attended — were dominated by the private owners’ bids to reduce taxes, gain exceptions in the face of contingencies, or find more sources of supply. What was missing was the voice of ordinary workers, like Luis Ángel.

Union presence in the non-state (private) sector is virgin land, an underestimated tool that perhaps only the most skilled know how to use. A different situation can be found in well-structured cooperatives that went smoothly from state-run to privately operated during the economic uncoupling that the government is performing.

For example, the Cuba-Santiago Taxi Agency, with Jorge Peña Bueno as union foreman, negotiated a contract that said that the calls should be distributed horizontally among all the drivers, not just among an elite group of drivers.

Jesús Chércoles, an independent worker who works in sheet-metal work and roofing, has proposed that Law 38 on Innovation and Rationalization protect innovators who work outside the state sector.

Everywhere one can find verbally adept workers who at some time were union leaders aware of the unions’ power as a shield for protection.

The space for rapprochement is there, but both parties have trouble addressing each other. The unions often are hampered by lassitude and their cadres’ lack of skill; the private trades (which are the more troubled of the two) often don’t believe the unions can represent them.

Some independent proprietors believe that the labor unions have traditionally been subordinated to the interests of the government and have no power to benefit them.

Other independents, because they’re self-employed for the first time, have cut off all relations with organizations they consider ideological or partisan, such as labor unions. In a society as politicized as Cuba’s, this attitude fills them with testosterone but, in practice, does nothing to improve their labor relations.

Such posturing may be a transitional stage, an untested scenario created by the novelty of independent proprietorship and the scant development shown by self-employment’s productive forces.

As I see it, the three actors in this play — the Proprietor of the means of production, the Government and the Worker, with the mediation of the Labor Unions — should be able to come together so as not to discourage investment.

That would allow Luis Ángel (despite his chronic allergy) to find a job that will allow him to buy a pair of shoes he really likes, afford his cell phone, and drink a beer while watching a Barcelona soccer game with his girlfriend.