HAVANA, Cuba.- During the recent plenary session of the National Council of the Cuban Workers Union (CTC), it emerged that thousands of workers from the Energy and Mining sector have gone to work in other sectors of the economy, especially the MSMEs. This exodus of state workers to the emerging non-state sector of the economy has provoked the concern of the regime and also that of its henchmen in the trade union movement.
Of course, it is not the first time that state workers (from companies or budgeted units) decide to venture into the non-state sector, mainly as self-employed workers. This was the case when many educators from state kindergartens opted to become self-employed educators; and also when many builders who worked in state brigades and contingents became self-employed in construction. In both cases there was no shortage of obstacles imposed by the authorities to curb this trend that affected government plans and objectives.
Prime Minister Manuel Marrero, present at this union meeting, echoed the aforementioned concern regarding the exodus of state workers to the private sector. remembered that “the Constitution of the Republic makes explicit that the fundamental entity within the economic actors is the socialist state company, the others are complements to it, and it cannot happen that this chain is detrimental to the company.”
What the high-ranking Castro official does not want to acknowledge is that the workers go to the sector that is most attractive to them, and not to the one that the Constitution -otherwise, a dead letter- indicates as prioritized. In the plenary session of the CTC itself, several anomalies that occurred in state companies that would take away the desire to work in them were made known. For example: some 26,000 Food and Fisheries workers have not received profits despite having fulfilled their production plans; and the provincial transportation companies are paying their workers’ wages up to two months late. To all this is added that, in general, the income received by non-state workers is higher than that received by those who work in companies and budgeted units.
On the other hand, the official statistics of the Cuban Government also reflect the upward trend in employment in the non-state sector, and the decline in the state sector. The Statistical Yearbook of Cuba 2021 shows the figures reported in this sense for the four-year period 2018-2021.
In 2018, workers in the state sector represented 68.4% of all employed persons in the country. Already in 2021 the percentage had fallen to 67.5%.
The non-state sector (made up of cooperative members, usufructuaries of idle land, self-employed workers and members of private MSMEs) was 31.5% of the total number of employees in 2018, and by 2021 they already represented 32.4% of all workers in the state. country.
Another bad news for the regime surfaced in the Union Plenary, and that is that despite all the pressure exerted on non-state workers, only 42% of them have decided to join these pro-government unions.
The truth is that, among other things, the preference of Cubans to work in the private sector of the economy constitutes an obstacle to the fundamental objective outlined by the government: to maintain the socialist state company as the main bulwark of the national economy.
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