Whenever Blum was asked about the recipe for success behind "his" conglomerate, the first sentence of his answer was always: "It's not my company." He placed great value on the Yugoslav model of worker self-management, in which workers' councils helped determine the strategy of their companies and elected the directors. To ensure this worked as well as possible, Energoinvest invested heavily in the training of its workforce, in turn contributing to the social development of Bosnia, which had been completely destroyed during the Second World War. Adherence to the principles of fairness and equal opportunity also saw the inclusion a high proportion of women in the workforce and equal pay for women and men.
In her documentary, Jasmila Žbanić brings together interviews with contemporaries, archival footage, and excerpts from television interviews to commemorate Blum and the Yugoslav model of workers' self-management. He described the company's greatest asset as its "people," a position some attribute to Blum's experiences in the Ustaša concentration camps, where he lost his entire family. This also led to Energoinvest being the only company in Yugoslavia without a Mercedes as a company car.
Blum was once asked whether he would trade places with "a general manager in the West or the East", whereupon he replied that he was less concerned with money and profit than with the development of society. Embedded in Josip Broz Tito's Non-Aligned Movement initiative, an alliance of states, primarily in the global South, that sought to avoid being dependent on either Moscow or Washington during the Cold War, Energoinvest became a leading global energy company. In 1988, they even developed their own email system for internal communications. After his retirement, Blum was appointed mayor of Sarajevo, in the 1980s, in order to contribute, with his experience, to the best possible organisation of the 1984 Winter Olympics. Unlike the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow and 1984 in Los Angeles, these games were boycotted by neither the Soviet Union nor the United States.
Both the diplomatic initiative of the Non-Aligned Movement and the grass-roots democratic model of worker self-management have, in the meantime, almost been forgotten. Blum brings them back to the spotlight.
Text: Bernd Buder
