Putting on the thinking caps
By Manuel Alberto Ramy
ramymanuel@yahoo.com
From Ramy’s blog, A Correspondent’s Notebook
After the official announcement that new spaces will be opened for the citizens’ economic activities, many Cubans have put on their thinking caps and are trying to figure out which activities will be contemplated and what their conditions and regulations will be.
They don’t want to wait until January, when they will be officially announced, because “I would like to know what suits me best, in case I’m ‘rationalized,’” said Carlos, a friend of mine, using the euphemism for “laid off.”
An administrative worker at a government agency, my neighbor is looking for ways to analyze the possibilities before him and thus plan his future. It’s what others like him do, people who work for businesses and industries whose bloated payrolls cause production and service slowdowns, plus a low productivity that is threatening our economy with a heart attack.
The announced layoffs are very much associated with the need to avoid that infarction through the “rationalization” or deflation of payrolls and other measures, because “the actualization plan is all-encompassing,” as some serious sources tell me. The figure of affected workers is near one million; if that number is correct, it means 19.8 percent of the nation’s active labor force.
Where will the laid-off workers be relocated? What jobs will be offered or facilitated to them? Independent, self-employed activities and cooperatives not associated with the agricultural sector (which exist and are effective) are on the official and popular job-wanted lists. An encouraging detail is that the new economic actors will be empowered to hire their own employees.
“If the regulations of that law don’t stifle me, I’ll do all right, because I’ll look for jobs on my own,” says Jorge Berrios, a furniture maker and free-lance builder.
Jorge is an example of how personal interests should coincide with collective interests, an important point that should be propitiated by the laws that protect flexibility. The point of confluence is that the regulations of the upcoming law should encourage, not stifle, the manpower that will become available.
One of the ways to energize the self-employed workers and builders’ cooperatives is to sell them supplies and tools at wholesale prices. So far, these supplies are sold at retail prices in the stores that sell in convertible pesos, or CUCs. Depending on the product, a 220-to-240 percent tax is added to the prices.
“A sack of cement costs 6.40 CUCs. If the price were reduced, more people would buy, for their repairs and constructions. The people win, everybody wins,” Jorge says. “And purchases ‘on the left’ would be eliminated,” he adds.
Buying “on the left” – a euphemism for “on the black market” – goes against the interests of the state, because the materials offered on the black market usually are stolen from state warehouses.
If the nation’s interests – in addition to improving the economy and increasing work productivity, an indispensable requirement for other, unavoidable measures such as the elimination of the dual currency – include giving jobs to the unemployed and jumpstarting sensitive sectors, such as construction, common sense suggests guaranteeing wholesale prices to the new economic actors. If that is not done, cooperative work and self-employment will lack the necessary attraction.
I asked Jorge, Carlos and several others if they’d agree to a progressive tax on their income. “Yes,” was their answer and both, each in his own way, said that they aspired not to be millionaires but to live decently “without the need to invent.”
