Friends,
Michael E's post of David Bacon's article on Russian workers is much appreciated.
A shorter version of the article is also in last week's Nation magazine. Bacon is
a fine labor journalist and photographer.
Michael E's own article on the U.S. labor movement appears in the latest issue of
Working USA. I think that it is the most radical article to appear in that
journal so far. Working USA is one of two new labor-oriented journals. The other
is New Labor Forum. Check them out.
Michael Yates
Michael Eisenscher wrote:
> WHERE WORKERS HAVE TO FIGHT FOR A PAYCHECK
> U.S. and Russian Unions Move Beyond the Cold War
> By David Bacon
>
> MOSCOW (4/16/98) -- Today 20 million Russian workers, one out of
> every four, don't get a check on payday. Their wages aren't just late by a
> day or two. People often go months without getting paid.
> Giant industrial enterprises make partial payment in car parts,
> soap or even sex aids. Workers do informal jobs, depend on other family
> members, and grow vegetables in tiny plots where, ironically, they used to
> take summer vacations outside the cities.
> The wage debt, estimated at $10 billion, is growing by 5% every month.
> Timor Timofeyev, director of Moscow's Institute for Comparative
> Research into Industrial Relations (ISITO) calls it a sign of "barbaric
> capitalism."
> For Vic Thorpe, general secretary of the International Federation
> of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions non-payment is a
> "basic violation of a central principle of civilized relations in the
> production process ... a clear and logical result of pursuing policies
> advanced by the evangelists of liberalization and the free market." The
> ICEM has been world labor's leading voice raising support for Russian
> workers.
> Non-payment is testing the ability of unions to transform
> themselves to fight the worst aspects of the country's economic freefall.
> The crisis is putting international labor solidarity to the test as well,
> measuring the distance traveled by the AFL-CIO in particular, away from its
> old cold-war hostility towards Russia's labor movement.
> Few workers in the U.S. or Canada would understand why Russian
> workers continue showing up for work with no paycheck in sight for months
> on end. The brutal truth is that there's nowhere else to go. There are no
> alternatives.
> In Moscow's huge Moskvitch auto plant, where a decade ago 25,000
> workers cranked out 200,000 cars a year, a few hundred autoworkers
> assembled only 2000 in 1997. They got paid in parts, which they then sold
> at cut rates to a cooperative operating inside the factory.
> At the Progress aircraft plant in Arsenyev, work stopped completely
> last November. The factory makes the Ka-50 Black Shark battlefield
> helicopter for export, and the C-Mosquito ship borne missile system. Its
> last payday was over a year ago. The workers, some of Russia's most
> skilled and productive, got a bread ration twice a week instead. They
> suspect the last manager improperly appropriated 2 billion rubles
> ($400,0000).
> In Ivanovo, once the bustling heart of the textile industry and a
> city that produced some of Russia's first industrial workers and earliest
> revolutionary fighters, the mills are mostly silent, the people hungry.
> When they work at all, they're paid in bed sheets.
> One Russian worker out of every eight last year was paid in kind,
> and 40% of those recently surveyed by the ISITO said they hadn't received
> their salaries for the last month. Coal miners have been owed over 160
> billion rubles ($27.5 million) in wages since August. Aircraft workers
> haven't been paid for nineteen months.
> Confounding liberal reformers who predicted that market forces
> would unleash consumer demand and greater productivity, industrial
> production has dropped much further than in the U.S.'s Great Depression.
> Last year Russia's coal mines produced only 244 million tons, a little over
> half that produced in the final years of the Soviet Union.
> The government collects taxes relentlessly, depriving enterprises
> of capital to function or pay salaries. It doesn't pay its own employees.
> When it stiffs its suppliers for purchases ranging from coal to airplanes,
> they stop paying wages. Meanwhile, revenue is siphoned off in massive
> corrupt privatization schemes, and the new owners of privatized enterprises
> then refuse to pay workers too. (see sidebar)
>
> Russian unions find non-payment extremely difficult to resolve
> because the problem is so extensive and so integrally a part of the new
> economic order. But some of labor's difficulties are also internal -
> unions today are in transition themselves.
> Under the old Soviet system, Russian trade unions encompassed 95%
> of the workforce, but functioned in a way that left them totally unprepared
> for present circumstances. While Lenin envisioned them early on as
> transmission belts carrying revolutionary ideas to workers, in practice
> unions played almost no ideological role at all. They functioned instead
> as distributors of part of the social wage.
> Soviet industrial enterprises ran schools, maintained hospitals and
> child care centers, erected apartment houses, and even administered
> vacation resorts hundreds of miles away from the plants themselves. A
> factory was, in effect, the nucleus of an entire town or city.
> Soviet trade unions administered this extensive network of social
> benefits. They were very close to enterprise managers, only rarely
> acknowledging contradictions between them and workers. David Mandel, in
> his "Rabotyagi" interviews documenting the experience of rank-and-file
> Soviet workers, describes the unions as "completely subordinated to the
> political and economic administrative apparatus."
> When perestroika made the creation of independent organizations
> possible, coal miners were the first workers to form them in the heat of
> spontaneous, quick-spreading strikes. Their anger was fueled by the
> abysmal conditions of miners in isolated coal towns, and their independent
> union, Russia's first, quickly became political. It saw the destruction of
> the old state apparatus, particularly the power of the Communist Party, as
> its main objective. Miners' strikes became shock waves helping to topple
> Gorbachev, bringing Boris Yeltsin to power, and ending the Soviet Union.
> The leaders of the independent miners' union believed that
> privatization, breaking the mines loose from government control, would make
> miners rich from the sale of Russian coal on the free, and especially
> foreign, market. They became stalwart supporters of the first economic
> reforms, backing even the most hard-line advocates of economic "shock
> therapy" in successive Yeltsin governments.
> Other workers saw the miners' union as a model, especially in
> industries where they believed reforms might give them access to foreign
> exchange, including airlines, longshore and transport.
> In 1991 the old Soviet trade union federation was dissolved, and a
> new one created by its affiliated unions, the Federation of Independent
> Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR). It called itself independent to underline
> its autonomy from the Communist Party, which Yeltsin temporarily outlawed
> later that year. The FNPR was the only mass national organization, apart
> from the military, to survive the transition from socialism.
> On the whole, it survived intact, inheriting the property and
> membership of the old Soviet unions, as well as their close relationship
> with worksite managers. By the early 1990s, Russia had produced two labor
> movements, one allied with managers against the government, the other
> seeing managers as the enemy, defending the government and its reforms.
> The independent unions eventually accounted for about 2,350,000
> workers. The FNPR has about 45 million members, organized in 43 industrial
> federations and 380,000 locals.
> In the FNPR's first major battle against the reforms, over 2.5
> million medical workers shut down Russia's healthcare industry for three
> weeks in 1992. Workers had grown desperate when the government
> appropriated only 40% of the money required to finance the system. Doctors
> and nurses told of operating on patients with razorblades, without
> anesthetic, because cuts in state subsidies had stopped production of
> medical supplies.
> The strike, led by the 4.5-million-member Russian Union of Medical
> Workers, sought to "ensure that health care protection of the population
> would have a budget that would rise with the cost of living," according to
> its president, Mikhail Kuzmenko.
> Both administrators and workers, belonging to the same union, took
> part. The strike ended with a quick cash fix and more government promises
> of money to pay wages and maintain the system, a solution which has since
> become the hallmark of government efforts to end many similar strikes.
> Yeltsin sought to coopt rising labor discontent by creating a
> Tripartite Commission for the Regulation of Social and Labor Relations,
> giving the FNPR 9 of its 14 labor seats. In the meantime, Victor Utkin and
> Alexander Sergeyev, leaders of the independent coal miners union, became
> members of Yeltsin's council of advisors.
> The FNPR advocated public policies to slow the progress of economic
> shock therapy and soften its impact, including continuing subsidies to
> maintain production at state enterprises, and allowing workers to become
> majority shareholders in privatized businesses. It tried to force the
> government to index income with rising inflation, especially the minimum
> wage and pensions.
> But the federation didn't attempt to bring workers into the streets
> to stop the process altogether. Perhaps it feared that workers would not
> respond to its call. But it also feared the consequences of all-out
> opposition. In 1993, the FNPR took the side of Russian parliamentary
> deputies in their confrontation with Yeltsin, who ended the crisis by
> shelling the parliament building with tanks. He later punished the
> federation with presidential decrees eliminating dues checkoff, and
> transferring control of social benefit funds to the state.
> But five years of economic reforms have failed to increase either
> production or standards of living. Instead, social benefits like childcare
> or subsidized rent have disappeared, while unemployment is a growing
> spectre. Consumer goods and healthcare are available, but only for those
> who can afford them, while millions of workers don't even get paychecks.
> Independent unions, as a result, have a harder time defending the
> reforms which create these problems. The FNPR, on the other hand, also has
> to have an answer for workers whose bosses won't pay them beyond simply
> condemning government policies. Both large-scale economic forces and
> pressure from impatient workers below are pushing the two union groupings
> towards each other.
> "The deep crisis in Russia is causing a crisis in our labor
> movement," Timofeyev says, "in its identity, its strategy and its
> international relationships. We're coming close to a time for new
> leadership on both sides."
> The tempo of protest is rising. In the first six months of 1997,
> according to the State Statistics Committee, strikes involved 3% of the
> entire Russian workhorse, five times the participation in 1996. In the
> month of July alone, workers at the Zvezda Submarine Yard in Nakhodka on
> the Pacific went on strike over 8 months of wage arrears. Nuclear power
> workers in Smolensk marched 350 kilometers to Moscow, on their time off
> from work, to protest four months of unpaid wages. Eight coworkers
> organized a hunger strike in the power station's recreation hall.
> When the schoolyear opened in September, over 1100 schools were on
> strike. Air traffic controllers shut fifty airports the same month,
> winning their unpaid wages in just hours, while defeating demands for
> vacation cuts at the same time. More nuclear workers, forbidden by law
> from striking, organized demonstrations while thousands of defense
> employees picketed government offices. Yeltsin owes defense enterprises
> $3.2 billion, of which $1 billion constitutes unpaid wages.
> This fall, miners in the country's westernmost Maritime region,
> around Vladivostok, stopped all coal deliveries to the area's power
> stations. The miners' action touched off strikes in the stations
> themselves, and power to the whole province shut down. Again the federal
> government came up with cash to partially pay wage debts going back months.
> But then in January, 1500 coal miners blocked the Trans-Siberian
> Railway in Partizansk, waving red flags and banners. Another 1000 workers
> from the Zvezda and Progress factories blocked it in Vladivostok.
> At the end of the month, miners at the Kuznetstkaya mine in the
> Siberian region of Kemerovo took over their mine, and for four days held
> its hated director, Alexander Ternovykh, captive. In 1991, the productive
> mine was the first privatized in Russia, sold to an Austrian company,
> Prosystem Gmbh. But output plunged, paychecks stopped, and finally three
> workers were blown up last year after Ternovykh sent them into a tunnel
> filled with methane. A court ruled the privatization illegal, and local
> authorities, including Kemerovo's new Communist governor Aman Tuleyev,
> moved to have it renationalized.
> Vladimir Chubai, head of the FNPR in the far east, declared that
> "we should change the criminal code to punish bosses who don't pay their
> workers." FNPR secretary Andrei Isayev announced this winter that the
> federation will go beyond directing its fire at the government to hold
> enterprise management responsible for non-payment as well. Isayev is a
> rising figure in the FNPR, more militant and less interested in alliances
> with political parties than its other leaders.
> Protests have grown in strength because they've begun to overcome
> some of the crippling divisions between the FNPR and independent unions.
> When miners shut down production last year in the main coal centers of
> Kuzbass and Vorkuta, both the old and new unions cooperated. In March, the
> FNPR and almost all the independents mounted a countrywide day of protest
> over non-payment, involving 27 million workers in 16,000 enterprises.
> According to Timofeyev, "relations between the independent unions
> and the FNPR are much closer every day."
>
