«This is capitalism. Your street’s named after a fascist, and Tito’s long gone.» Political ideology is rarely overtly discussed in The Thing to Be Done, which follows the daily goings-on in the Workers’ Advisory Office in Slovenia’s capital of Ljubljana, but this sardonic observation thrown into a phone conversation to yet another exploited worker, along with the film’s titular nod to Marxism, is a succinct and damning reminder that the more vaunted aspects of the former Yugoslavia’s «human» socialism are long over in its seceded states.
Workers’ Advisory Office
A co-production between Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia, the documentary is directed by Zagreb-born Srđan Kovačević, who has explored the organisation of global capital before in his work, including his 2021 Factory to the Workers, on the 2005 occupation of a machine tools factory in Croatia. The picture of labour built up in The Thing to be Done, which had its world premiere in competition at DOK Leipzig, is anything but abstract. Client after client, most of whom are foreign-born, who have eventually found their way to the advisory office for help describe in unvarnished, matter-of-fact fashion the abysmal conditions under which they are employed, in a Slovenian labour market where scams are commonplace and unscrupulous employers know just how to get around the law to take advantage of the vulnerable position of migrant workers and cheat them out of their rights.
From its cramped, homely rooms above street level, the Workers’ Advisory Office offers information, advice, and representation to anyone who suspects they are being exploited by their employer and operates within the framework of the law to improve their situations, and half of its clients have come to Slovenia to work from abroad. It was originally called the Advisory Office for Migrants, but the name was changed to acknowledge the fact that those it helps want to be considered workers like any other in the country. While they are technically equal under the law, the various accounts we are privy to reveal entrenched prejudice and a litany of rights abuses from shady bosses that relentlessly and remorselessly game the system in any way that they can. There are endless stories of health insurance being cancelled retroactively, pay withheld that is needed to pay rent and support families back home, sick leave denied after workplace injuries, routine overtime unremunerated and penalties written into contracts to claim from workers’ bank accounts for bogus reasons, taxes never filed and pension funds left empty, staff tricked into signing documents that cancel out their entitlements. Under an agreement between Slovenia and Bosnia, if an employer cancels a work permit within a year, the hire is sent back home, and this hangs as leverage over newcomers to skew an already coercive power dynamic. It’s like prison, but there’s more work, say those tied into these indentured situations, who are ill-equipped to navigate the ins and outs of this alien environment, and reluctant to voice anything that might upset their bosses and the precarious chance for something better that they have gambled on.
The portrait built up here in a modestly observational but utterly devastating manner is one of cross-border exploitation that is just a small prism of a much wider phenomenon of global capital and neocolonialism, where labour power from a so-called Third World props up the wealth of the richest nations, draining bodies and minds while denying their intrinsic value.
New arrangmenets
Here, the thing to be done, as per Kovacevic’s title, which is as much a challenge and a call to arms as it is a descriptor, is to not only acknowledge the true nature of this unfair exchange, but also to contribute to a more communal and just arrangement. Goran Lukić, one of the founders of the Workers’ Advisory Office, spearheads a protest by outsourced workers at the Port of Koper. Some are still not employed permanently, even though they have worked there for more than twenty years, on long night shifts with no coffee breaks for a few euros an hour. Instilling the tools and confidence in clients to advocate for their own rights is a crucial part of the office’s activities, and of their mission of restoring the dignity robbed from workers so callously. One of the handful of staff who have committed their energy to the Workers’ Advisory Office came to Slovenia as a construction worker himself before he was injured and had paperwork troubles, and this pathway from resigned victim to empowered advocate shapes the non-governmental organisation’s ethos. A form of syndicalism has also driven the film’s production process, as we learn from an introductory title, ensuring us that it was made in accordance with profit-sharing between the filmmakers and protagonists — the thing to be done, we can only conclude.
