Fear of forced labour in Belarus
17 December 2012Wood processing workers in Belarus have been banned from leaving their jobs on pain of being sentenced to compulsory labour and returned to the production line.
The government decree follows the loss of skilled workers to better paid jobs in neighbouring Russia. No-one will be allowed to leave without permission until the end of the five-year modernisation plan for the timber industry in 2015.
The law has been criticised as a return to serfdom for 13,000 workers in the country's nine state-owned factories. Government pledges to match Russian wages - £600 a month, compared with the present £87 - had been met with scepticism.
The government has allocated €680m to modernise the wood processing industry since 2007, but the reconstruction has come to nothing and much of the purchased equipment remains in crates.
Experts said the failure was part of the country's problem with a Soviet-style economy in which one million of the country's 10 million inhabitants were working abroad.
