The rationalizations: A first look
By Manuel Alberto Ramy
From A Correspondent’s Notebook
Deflating payrolls is the equivalent of firing workers. To deflate half a million active workers from a 5,027,900 workforce over a period of months, a task that will face bureaucratic delays and the displeasure of the workers concerned, is a necessary decision, because the country’s economy cannot continue to carry a ballast that, by concealing the actual unemployment, has been seriously undermining the productivity that is essential to solving pressing problems.
The country cannot go on like that and, without labor productivity, there is no integral solution possible.
But the deflation process needs a catcher (a receiver), sectors willing to absorb the affected workforce. Will there be any? The official statements indicate that the state sector can offer openings only in jobs that are underfilled and unappealing, such as construction, agriculture, law enforcement and education.
To make such jobs appealing depends primarily on the wage conditions and the needs of the unemployed, who, faced with the gradual disappearance of gratuities and subsidized food, measures that are bound to continue, will increase.
Logically, I think that the deflation process is part of the overall project of actualization of the economy (2011-2015) and that, therefore, the overall project, to be announced gradually, will push and sweeten the state offers to make them appealing. But today, according to a report by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, 465,000 of the displaced must find their niche in the nonstate sector. It is important to point out that, when the government determines that the private sector should receive these many workers, it is conferring upon the private sector a strategic value, not a short-term or temporary value, as happened in the 1990s.
Can a private sector capable of assimilating and maintaining a workforce that large be developed in Cuban society? Several factors will determine this, among them the facilities available to secure credits and supplies, the creation of wholesale warehouses, and the official regulations that rule them. The absence of any of these items would undermine the effort to open and energize the economy.
The regulations may encourage workers or not, depending on the balance between the amount of taxes they have to pay and the power of stimulation the regulations may contain. On this important point, I am beset by several questions and I pause at one of them.
The regulations enforce government policy decisions that are based on consensus, a characteristic that implies a diversity of opinion as to the opening of new productive forces and property rights. Not surprisingly, there are trends in both directions, so the consensus serves as a thermometer for such trends. If, for example, some activities are taxed at 40 percent, as unofficially indicated, the lack of interest in those activities would be unquestionable. The opposite would happen in other instances.
What would happen to the thousands and thousands of laid-off workers who, after receiving their 60-percent subsidy, remain in the limbo of economic activity? Will that idle workforce, out on the street, amid a process of change, be capable of influencing the consensus reached so far? Or will it be a factor of social unrest?
Perhaps the changes are gradual and not with the speed desired not only because of the pace of consensus in the political leadership, but also because of an analysis made of their possible effect on society showed that a slow pace may be needed to prevent potential crises that might get out of the boundaries acceptable to any government.
As one young Cuban singer says in one of his songs: It’s not a question of tearing down the house, but of repairing it, reordering it. And the move has begun.
