>>>Apart from Jugoton (good vinyl, sleeves so-so, good assortment of bands, spotty policy of publishing foreign - didn't get any Tull until Minstrel, or Bolan until Tanks), there was PGP-RTB (production of gramophone recordsboards - radio television Belgrade - bad, thick stiff vinyl, lots of good bands but then these had to wait their turn, didn't publish much domestic, foreign not much either), then Suzy in Zagreb (notable for very good vinyl and a CBS license - where we got our Saja & Gaja - Simon & Garfunkel ;), Diskos (bad vinyl, almost exclusively folk singles, but a few bands started there), Helidon in Ljubljana (the first domestic live double album, from Boom 72 rock festival, still sounds like new). Don't remember whether there was any other publisher of any importance, specially not in Sarajevo; most of the Bosnian bands went with either Jugoton or PGP, many of them actually flipping between, then the old publisher would churn a Best Of just before the new one
>>>would come out etc... the usual stuff. Those self-managing showbiz workers knew exactly the showbiz stuff anyone else knows ;).
>>
>>Hmm.
>>So if the label had a song that earned a lot of money and they couldn't divvy it up as salary (or a dividend in any form) what happened to it ?
>
>You get the list of reasons nobody wanted to code payrolls :). There was a myriad tricks, legal loopholes which were plugged this way or other. There was, first, the legal part - so you'd pump up your salary fund as far as it went, until it would become suspicious and someone would pull an accusation that comrades in the so-and-so enterprise are enjoying an unfairly favorable position in the market, which is not their own merit but just incidence of circumstances... and then there'd soon be a law which could be slapped on it. Or, there'd be a way to have some way of getting some of the money accounted as "cost of doing business", like "cost of representation" (so the word "representation" came to mean "enterprise pays dinner and drinks"), then that'd get limited after being heavily used for a year or two. Then there was the hot meal - in a workers' state, you get a decent meal at work, period. That's cost of doing business, all legal. Now you could be a large shop and have your own
>kitchen (I've been to a few at customers' places, they could be really good), or have just a mess hall with food brought from a catering outfit, or you could just hand out coupons to your workers... which would be as good as money, tax free, in your neighborhood supermarket. For a while, I was getting one fridge full each month from just that (then had to switch jobs because I was implicitly told I can't get a dime more unless I become a boss, which I didn't want to do). Then there'd be a paid vacation (in an enterprise owned resort, or a dozen enterprises owning timeshares there or... once we just paid it for all of us and closed the shop for ten days). Or you'd get a loan to solve your housing - what I got wasn't much, but hey, at least I got some, and the inflation made it go away soon anyway. There were also attempts to use company cars for fun - weekends (at the motel ;) etc, which was the reason these cars soon got white-on-red license plates, so anyone could spot them. A larger
>car with red local plates sure looked suspicious when parked in front of a watering hole ;).
>
>So you had opposing interests: on one hand, your common homo pocketus, who'll behave as Friedrich Engels predicted, seeing to his immediate perceived economic interests, and The Party (and the CEOs who were vetted by it and charged with watching over the proper stewardship of the society's property), who'd prefer that the profits aren't squandered right away, but rather invested in further development towards the bright future. The CEO I once had was the former local Party branch secretary who took to vigilance against anybody getting rich on his watch... and then became a CEO. Imagine how great salaries we had ;). And, quis custodiet ipsos custodes - these guys would often get their hands on the extra profit which could have ended in the undeserving hands of privileged workers, and would redirect it into new projects (aka monuments to self) which would then result in, say, a dozen new sugar refineries when three would have been enough, and all sorts of stupid investments which
>wouldn't do much good and may actually be undone soon - like renovating the main street every few years etc. The famous example is the joke about Tito, who once asked in Smederevo, "what's going best here", and they said "grožđe" (grapes); he misheard that as "gvožđe" (iron), and the city is saddled with an ore refinery, steel plants, pollution and... the thing never made any real profit, it was always too expensive to run. All that in a city which has a strain of grapes named after it.
>
>The laws on salaries and other personal income have thus become very complicated, and a salary slip was as complicated as a, say, menu in a Mc. There were a dozen clauses whereby one would gain money, and then two dozen ways these were taxed. There were even voluntary local taxes, on sub-municipal, municipal or city level. For example, I think this, so-called "self-contribution" was voted in for the fourth five-year term (or was it 5x4? never mind) in my city to finish the new hospital building. There was another to expand the system of sewers - that one turned out fine, only once and we got our stool processed and ecologically returned to nature, and (even better) no more street floods after any major downpour.
>
>Now imagine coding a payroll :). In every software company, you'd get one guy who'd simply be written off. He'd code the payroll, know everything about it, won't ever get to do anything else, and won't ever be in a danger of losing a job... it's a job nobody wants. Every 4-5 months there's something new, and you have to apply it to (and over) any craplegacy data that some customers with special cases may have.

Thanks - an interesting explanation of how things worked. I was in Moldova for the best part of a year (can't remember which year - but it was well before the 'cold war' ended - maybe mid '80s). I think the same type of systems were operating there but language barriers meant that I could never grasp the more subtle aspects. Just a lot of work and business practices that never made much sense to me at the time.

Regards,
Viv

Regards,
Viv