The general practice CEO of anything that The Party appoints him to. Good old party soldier, who never bothered to think much about anything practical, just stuck to the party line and enforced the policy.
In his time, the policy started with the premise that we have succeeded in building a market socialism, in which independent, worker-run oours produced and traded and supplied the working class with whatever they needed, but it was not perfect, and there were some who'd have a tough time because of this. Others, OTOH, would have it too good without much of their merit. This unjust distribution did exist - it was oft said that it is better to be a cleaner in Naftagas than teach in high school. This injustice was to be fixed by party policy, which was to take from the haves and to support the fallen have nots. Not to fix the system, but to redistribute - get all the money under their control, and then wield that control at their whim. Can't guess how much of that never got where it was earmarked for; not necessarily into private pockets, but rather into monuments to self, sports and other suspect projects.
So he got to be the secretary of the municipal komitet just when this kind of policy, which reduced the total amount of self-managed profits to about 2% (the rest was legally taken away for various purposes), was at its highest. He got it into his head that nobody should get rich on his watch. It was actually „undeservedly rich“, too long for him to memorize. The deservedly rich category seemed to be populated by managerial staff only. Then he went to be the CEO of the local sdk and managed to keep their salaries as they were, despite the inflation, which was still tame at the time - but he stayed there long enough. In the following years, the party imposed more and more limitations on salaries, always based on the previous year, which was a low start for them. It took them years to recover.
And then he came to be the director general of stour. I don't even remember his surname. He may be anything he likes, a Hercoš, a Ličanin - irrelevant, this is Banat, here it's the nickname first, and the rest is quite optional.
His internal policy rested on balancing the RZZS* against the member oours. The RZZS were we, he, his vicedirectors and a few clerks. He saw to it that it never looks as if the RZZS is living well on the expense of all others, so it was that it was living on the expense of all others but not well. For which it, though, provided some services, e.g. the erc did a sizable chunk of the administration for Čelik, Presprom, Ogrev, and NuProm and the textile used the same apps on their own pdp machines. But when we started complaining that the stour level agreement made the average salary of RZZS equal of the average of the whole, because that's adding apples and oranges (serbian: grannies and frogs). There were a dozen graduates among us, which is about half or more, while the shop staff, who were a huge majority in the rest of stour, averaged less than high school, with many of them not even having a full elementary. Our average was further skewed by his own salary, and his two vicedirectors, and those of a few important politicians' wives who were heads of some imaginary services, they had to be provided for and handsomely at that, so a programmer in the erc had a salary about two packs of cigarettes than a floor manager in a supermarket on the corner... So once when I spoke out about that, at a session of the central workers' council (I was the delegate of RZZS that year), I heard back from NuProm that he claimed that I was proposing to cut everybody's salary to raise ours.
Once our trade union, for what of it we happened to have, managed to arrange a supply of sugar at cost price, or just wholesale. Us being a small unit, there'd be perhaps a dozen people going for it, so the total quantity was okay for the supplier. But nope, this guy heard about it, though how would it look if any other oour heard about RZZS negotiating a deal they could never get (NuProm alone had few hundred workers, they could barely get anything from so thin a source), so to avoid that he simply ordered the union to cancel the whole transaction.
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* „radna zajednica zajedničkih službi“ - labor community of common/communal services, i.e. the HQ of stour
20-IX-2012 - 16-V-2026