Horizont workers demand management resignation

The Horizont plant has lost its positions. The management of the holding is incapable of improve the situation.

The Minsk plant works with stoppages. More than one hundred people have been fired. Problems at the plant started several months ago. And at the beginning of March a four-day week was introduced at some workshops. Particularly, this concerned the TV-set assembly workshop. Friday was proclaimed a day off, and four working days were transferred to autumn.

At the same time the Horizont holding’s chief executive officer claims that “there are no staff reductions now, people simply have their contracts expiring and it is the employer’s right whether to prolong them or not”.

The Horizont trade union’s leader claims that the “situation is complicated, but it does not yet cause serious anxiety”.

“The electronics and home appliances plant has, unfortunately, been working in such a regime for the second consecutive year. The customer does not want overstocking, the output must go diorectly into sales, but there is no demand so far. TV-sets are now a seasonal good and are bought at the second half of the year. Main workload will start from the second half of May”, - the trade union leader notes.

Thus, the management of the holding has equated the seasonal character of home appliances sales to almost the one of agriculture. However, workers blame the enterprise’s management of the current inaction.

In the past 10 years the technology was not modernized and the existing enterprises, they are non-profitable, the main site in Minsk has been given away to banks for debts, Horizont’s employees tell.

The situation has made employees address the Minister of Industry with a request to change the holding’s management.

“The staff of the enterprises of the holding do no longer believe the promises and the professionalism and the managers and see the solution to the piled-up problems in a prompt change of the holding’s management”, - a worker noted.