which were effectively top people email list organised After Yevtushenko's first dismissive words about the strikers ("there were about twenty strikers in some factory," he claimed), some workers at the Minsk Tractor Plant marched through top people email list Minsk to Parliament to demonstrate their opposition. In my opinion, this was not specifically class-conscious: it overlapped with the "chains of solidarity against violence." But on August 14, outside Parliament, top people email list we could see workers holding banners that read: "We are workers, not sheep.
There is only top people email list one large national trade union association, the Belarusian Federation of Trade Unions, which has become part of the bureaucratic apparatus of the Yevtushenko government. All its activities are limited to the organisation top people email list of national holiday celebrations and the issuance of vouchers for homes for the elderly. This "union" has nothing to do with protecting workers' rights. The few independent unions that were formed top people email list in the wake of the rise of the union movement in the early 1990s were crushed.
Only a few companies top people email list have cells, for example of the Independent Trade Union of Belarus. These independent unions are now more similar to NGOs, relying less on contributions from workers than on foreign subsidies. Its activities top people email list focus on legal assistance to individual employees who have requested it. The last major subway workers' protest in 1995 was brutally suppressed by Yevtushenko. Since then, there top people email list has been no talk of strikes. Now we are seeing the first major workers' protest movement since then. Today, these protests resembled meetings with company management, the "yellow" unions, and local authorities.