Boracs -- an industrial survivor

Borac factory -- and professor with plant directorI traveled by bus today with students from the Sarajevo School of Ecoomics to visit the Borac (pronounced like the Movie and character; Borats) plant in Travnik, one of the few survivors of Bosnia's once booming textile industry.

It was a tough thing to see. "Pitiful, pathetic really," was the description of one student I talked to. The firm is hanging on, basically, because it can hire woman from nearby villages willing to accept little pay. They have gardens and cows to survive on. Even so, the best that the director who spoke to us could predict was that it might last a few more years.

The run of hard luck at this firm --and others here -- began with the war. Borac thrived during the Tito time of central planning and socialist sensibiities. In the 1990s war shut down production. When the shelling stopped, former customers were improverished, money for refurbishing and updates had disappeared and the Yugoslavia market has been carved up. Even within Bosnia, Borac lost outlets privatized by the Serbian Republika Srpska section.Ethnic division even matters in the clothes business. On top of all that, globalization has made textiles an industry for the poorest countries of the world where workers are willing to accept subsistence pay. Even well-run and capitalized firms are shutting down in the west and Africa.

So Borac is left with a hot, outdated factory and equipment, socialist-era furnishings and socialist labor practices such as 42 free sick days a year and lenthy paid maternity leave that were once humanitarian and now are economically crippling.

The professor asked the director what they were trying to do to get out of the fix, what experiments, what bold actions were they considering. He pulled on his cigarette and shook his head. Interesting lesson for management students.

We then walked through the plant, in full operation on a Saturday, with women stitching and men and women at stand-up ironing boards pressing and steaming Hugo Boss coats.