By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Driven by increasing rank and file ferment, Russia's trade union bodies have united around a call for a day of work stoppages and demonstrations to force the government and employers to pay spiralling wage debts. Set for March 27, the day of action for "work, wages and social guarantees" may involve 20 million workers.
From 46 trillion roubles (US$8.2 billion) in early December, total overdue wages in Russia are now estimated by the trade unions to have reached almost 50 trillion. Of this sum, 9.5 trillion roubles are owed by the government.
Only a minority of workers receive their pay in full and on time, and delays of five months are common. Many workers receive only food coupons from their enterprises, or are paid in kind in goods ranging from tampons to wheelbarrows.
So widespread has the dissatisfaction become that President Boris Yeltsin, in a much-heralded speech to parliament on March 6, was forced to describe the planned stoppages as "largely justified" and as "an alarm signal that people are running out of patience".
The March 27 strike and protest was called late in February by a general council meeting of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR). Covering 42 million workers, the FNPR is the country's main labour organisation.
The FNPR has held nationwide days of action each spring and autumn for years. These occasions have generally been unimpressive, and have made little impact. Apart from poor organisation, the problem has been the lack of a clear mobilising strategy; the FNPR leadership has been reluctant to urge unions to shut down production and to lead members onto the streets in big protests.
The FNPR chiefs have also been uncomfortable about adding political demands — above all, for the resignation of the government — to economic pleas.
Sensing unseriousness and irresolution at the top levels, workers have been unwilling to lose pay and risk reprisals by pushing the call for protests to its limit.
But the demands for action coming from the work collectives now contain a note of desperation, and even the most timid union leaders are starting to prefer the dangers of battle to the greater perils of trying to desert. For this reason, the FNPR's February general council meeting focused clearly on the need for the broadest possible one-day strike.
The meeting also called on government ministers to resign "in connection with the continuing growth of wage debts, the non-fulfilment of trade union demands and the inability of the government to resolve these issues". However, the FNPR leaders stopped short of embracing another demand that plainly has broad support among workers — for Yeltsin to resign as well.
Traditional apologists for Yeltsin within the labour movement are now being forced to make hurried readjustments. The relatively small, and for years pro-regime, All-Russian Confederation of Labour (VKT) and the Confederation of Labour of Russia (KTR) have in the past shunned strikes and public protests in favour of court cases against specific employers. But the VKT has now pledged support for the FNPR's strike plans, as have the main affiliated unions of the KTR.
In a somewhat different category is the Mining and Metallurgical Union of Russia (GMPR). This split-off from the FNPR has a membership of 1.7 million workers, mainly in the steel industry. Early in March the GMPR was reported to have joined the call for strike action.
In practice, few GMPR members are likely to strike, because the metallurgical enterprises that continue to function often have a continuous production schedule, and could not cease operating without massive losses. However, steelworkers are expected to take part in protest demonstrations and pickets.
Statistics for labour disputes during the past few months underline the point that union leaders now ignore calls for protest action at their peril. According to press reports in mid-February, 5716 strikes were recorded in Russia during January, up 63% on the same month last year. A total of 1.57 million working days were lost.
The leap in the strike figures was due to mass stoppages by education workers, with medical staff also mounting important protests. Despite government promises, the demands by these workers — who are paid mainly out of regional budgets — were rarely met.
In mid-February only in Moscow, Samara and the oil-rich Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District were teachers reported to be receiving all their pay on time. On February 17, teachers in 86 of Russia's 89 administrative regions began another round of coordinated protests.
Local strikes and demonstrations have proliferated as conditions in particular cities and workplaces become intolerable. Late in February workers in the gold-silver-lead mining complex at Salair in central Siberia occupied the management offices of their enterprise, before going on to seize the premises of the local administration.
The 3000 workers had not been paid in full for close to a year; they and their families had subsisted on bread doled out by the company. But on February 25, the bread deliveries had failed to arrive.
Another notable struggle erupted early in March in the far east. Workers at a nuclear submarine repair plant in the city of Bolshoy Kamen had not been paid for five months. After a mass protest meeting on March 5 expressed no confidence in the president and government, thousands of workers blocked the Vladivostok-Nakhodka highway for three hours.
The nuclear submarine-building yard at Severodvinsk on the White Sea has experienced aftershocks from a major strike that took place in mid-February. According to Radio Mayak on March 4, shipyard engineers threatened to tamper with a nuclear reactor if a wage agreement was not fulfilled. Only after two days of negotiations were they persuaded to leave the reactor room.
The decision by the FNPR leadership to go ahead with the March 27 strikes and demonstrations appears to mark the end, for now, of the union federation's quest for "social partnership" with employers and the government.
The crisis of the "social partnership" strategy is symbolised by the paralysis of the Tripartite Commission that was set up to unite representatives of unions, employers and the state in solving labour problems. For years this organ formed the axis of the FNPR chiefs' approach to defending working people. But in recent times the commission has ceased to take decisions, as the interests at play within it have proven irreconcilable.
Relations between the union federation and the government turned sour months ago, as union negotiators discovered that promises to sign over money for wages were often worthless. Now the usual bloc within the Tripartite Commission — unions and employers against the government — is under acute strain as well.
In mid-February, leaders of FNPR unions warned the country's best known employer body, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, that if back wages were not paid, the labour unions would unleash an "all-Russian labour dispute".
According to the Moscow daily Segodnya on February 25, the FNPR leaders later backed down from this ultimatum. But with enterprise managements answerable for the bulk of unpaid wages, case-by-case showdowns with employers can only become more frequent.
With the collapse of their preferred approach, and under strong rank and file pressure, the leaders of the FNPR are now being forced to embrace a strategy of class struggle. In the discourse of Russian liberals, this is perhaps the worst sin of which a labour organisation might be guilty — a denial of the "fact" of common interests uniting all elements of society.
The FNPR leaders were sincere, if naive, in their long search for "social partnership". Meanwhile, enterprise directors and government ministers were able to wage their class struggle with rare gall and astonishing success, to the extent of taking workers' labour for months on end without paying for it. Now the free ride, along with the sentimental illusions, is coming to an end.