Employment data

At the beginning of the nineties the metallurgical works were facing severe over-employment. The reasons for this situation can be traced back to the seventies:

• Metallurgy (like a number of other branches of the national economy) employed in addition to its main productive activity a large part of the labour force in the field of so-called social consumption (recreational centres, special-interest activity and the like).
• Another aspect was the fact that the metallurgical organisations have been built up as fully autonomous production and economic units with own power engineering, housing economy, training and apprentice centres and the like. In the interest of higher valorisation, further power, engineering and other departments have been linked up to the integrated iron and steel works. The units formed, in this way, complied in the accepted philosophy neither with the intentions nor with practically possibilities of privatisation and with the entry of Czech and foreign capital in particular.
• The other side of the coin of over-employment in metallurgical works at the beginning of the nineties was the already above-mentioned decreasing production in connection with the difficulties in trading the Czech metallurgical production in local and foreign markets. This resulted in several times lower labour productivity in comparison with abroad.

Therefore, reduction of labour force is caused by:

• decreased sales and production (in all sequentialities - competitive ability, new construction solutions, quality, savings in steel works)
• ”elimination” of non-productive and service facilities and departments
• preparation for privatisation of new structured production units