A STRIKE ON THE MARKET

Yesterday and the day after yesterday was a day of strike for businessmen selling goods on the Dynamo stadium.

The action of protest is provoked by inordinately high rent. Now it is calculated not according to the official rate of dollar (103 thousands of rubles), but to the rate set by the National bank (220 thousands) - it's more close to the real one. Hundreds of Dynamo's businessmen can't afford to pay every month more than 20 millions. Because purchasing power of population is going down, and there are days when businessmen sell nothing. Their requests to postpone the rent for some days were unsuccessful.

Arnold Pechiorski, the head of the Joint committee of trade unions, considers that market administration's politics will make businessmen leave the market. There are places where rent isn't so expensive. For example, Zhdanovichy market values its business partners more.

Dynamo' merchants conducted a meeting, made the authorities know about their problem and now they are waiting for reply.

Konstantin Stoliarchuk

... P.S. Yesterday a correspondent of "Vecherniy Minsk" met the director of the Dynamo market Leonid Kurilin. He doesn't find a trouble in the strike. He thinks that they are making worse to themselves: if they strike they will sell less. The new rate of dollar isn't invented by the market administration. The latter doesn't afraid of losing renters. Kurilin says that re-registration of renters for the next year proceeds apace, and there will be no unoccupied places. In the administration building there really was a crowd of businessmen discussing the new rate. They were outraged but ... paid.

Translated by Olga Detiuk
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