Never mind all the money they stole and provisions they charged, but they didn’t fix the roads! Aren’t twenty-five million euros a lot, Mile? On top of all that was stolen and grabbed, for now with no chances of being returned, we also have annexes for “finishing” the roads. From the same companies! Damn it with the roads! These Balkan people are used to paying three times more for something three times less.
If you’re travelling across Macedonia, to the wonderful city of Ohrid, throughout the streets in the cities, and other roads across the country, you will see…If you see them. Tired, dripping in the dusty area of the construction works, weak and starved, in ragged clothes, darkened by the sun, having gotten older ahead of time – the construction workers. They are holding the flags with an undefined color, one should be red, the other green, and they signalize. From the highway – one lane. Somewhere a traffic light guides the vehicles, somewhere a person. And it’s like this for years. As if the Cheops Pyramid is being built with a teaspoon.
Indeed, let’s put everything aside. Even the long years, more specifically, the decades that the authorities need to organize and order the construction of roads and streets, or their repairs; and the mind-blowing amounts that are just not appropriate for a poor country in everlasting transition; and the big provisions they charge the winners of tenders, for which they have never managed to convince the public that they are somewhat close to being in order; and the awfully bad quality, because of which serious repairs and corrections are needed in a short time or immediately, or missed tracks, thin layers of asphalt and much more; and the bad, even non-existing signalization…Never mind all of that.
Let’s forget, for a moment, also that it is our money that they have taken to finish a job, and not to make our lives bitter. Our money, that we can demand back, just like we can do in a store if we aren’t satisfied with the service or product. Let’s forget, for a moment, all of that. It’s about the people…
People are the most precious thing, their life and dignity. There’s nothing dignified in theft, and there is nothing worse than humiliating and starving people.
They are exploiting workers to extreme boundaries, they are tormenting them with horrible working conditions, and their health and safety are hanging by a thread with every passing minute at the construction sites. The attitude towards them is humiliating, while the monthly compensation is miserable. Workers are put in such a position that they’re actually happy to have that job, because they feed their families with that miserable salary.
I know that the bosses don’t feel sorry for that. We also know that they’re not afraid of the law that protects workers’ rights (decent compensation, social security, pension, health care, protection at the workplace, etc.). We know that the big bosses of these companies, foreign and domestic, feel like immortal gods, seated at a rich feast with the political potentates.
But! Aren’t they embarrassed for the whole world to see their workers like that, like ghosts from the Middle Ages? Can’t they take aside a million euros more to feed and reward the work they are investing day and night on the roads THEY are not constructing as it is expected? A million euros for them is like a hundred denars for the ordinary person in Macedonia.
They have hundreds of millions, “give” tens of millions for provisions, so have them put aside half a million out of their profit and half of the greedy tender-authorities, and have them give the workers working clothes, a break for good eating and a decent, at least a bit more decent, salary. They they will be real bosses! Now there just bloodthirsty people, regardless of whether they are from China, Greece or Macedonia, while the millions they make so dishonestly, just makes them uglier and undignified. Shame on you!
Translation: Natasa Cvetkovska
