By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — In one of the largest labour protest actions in Russia for years, an estimated 600,000 coal industry workers struck on March 1 to demand payment of back wages and the allocation of new government subsidies. Reports from union leaders indicate that work ceased for 24 hours at as many as 80% of Russia's coal mines and open cuts.
The massive strike marked a new stage in the political development of the miners' movement. The leadership of the smaller of Russia's two coal industry unions, the Independent Union of Miners (NPG), was forced to coordinate its actions with the "traditional" Independent Union of Coal Industry Employees (NPRUP).
The NPG is the standard-bearer of Russia's small but widely publicised "free" trade union movement, most of whose member unions have until now given vocal support to President Boris Yeltsin.
Not only were the divisions in the miners' movement challenged on March 1, but the demands raised often showed a hard political edge. Although union leaders in Moscow insisted that the strike was limited to economic issues, numerous strike committees in the Sakhalin, Kuzbass, Vorkuta and Rostov coal basins demanded that the government resign and that Yeltsin call early presidential elections.
The decision to call the strike came as miners realised that the government's newly generous fiscal policies did not include prompt payment of state debts to coal enterprises, or providing the coal industry with the grants it needs to keep operating. State debts to the coal industry now reportedly total about 500 billion roubles (US$290 million); this sum will be paid off only gradually over the coming months. The finance ministry has reportedly agreed to provide subsidies to the coal industry in 1994 of 5.6 trillion roubles (US$3.2 billion). But industry economists put the minimum necessary sum at 11.9 trillion roubles.
If the latter sum is not provided, NPRUP leader Vitaly Budko told journalists recently, the price of a ton of coal, which now ranges from 10,000 to 30,000 roubles, will have to be raised to 94,000 roubles. Even at existing prices, many of the industry's customers have been unable to pay for coal deliveries, and have built up vast debts to coal enterprises.
For many rank and file miners, the government's position amounts to a sentence of slow starvation. Unless state debts are paid and subsidies increased, wage payments will remain months overdue. Large numbers of miners still have not been paid for work performed in December, and are living in acute poverty.
The situation is particularly desperate in remote districts such as Vorkuta, where there is little alternative employment and both husbands and wives often work for coal enterprises.
Miners are also alarmed that the promised subsidies will not be enough to maintain acceptable levels of safety. In the Rostov coal basin in southern Russia, miners are complaining that their work has become more dangerous because coal enterprises have been unable to pay for timber needed for pit-props.
Fewer and fewer miners are persuaded that they have any stake in keeping Yeltsin in office and his policies in operation. Meanwhile, the chances for miners of forcing changes through purely economic struggles are slight. Coal supplies in Russia are now relatively abundant for enterprises that can pay for them; according to Budko, stockpiles are now 35% greater than normal.
Thus union leaders are under strong pressure to campaign around openly political demands. A recent conference of labour collectives in the Kuzbass, where miners are the main force in the labour movement, went beyond demands for Yeltsin to seek a new mandate, passing a motion of no confidence in the president as a guarantor of the rights and freedoms of citizens.
For large numbers of miners to call on Yeltsin to quit is a highly embarrassing development for the authorities. In 1989 and again in 1991, coal miners staged large strikes that played a critical role in weakening the Soviet regime. Later, the miners formed a symbolically important part of the social base of Yeltsin's pro-capitalist "reforms".
The new situation is even more embarrassing for pro-Yeltsin union leaders, primarily those of the NPG. Most of these officials were at one point among a layer of militants who in 1991 led a split from the "traditional" coal industry union, accusing it of reluctance to struggle against the Soviet authorities.
Ironically, the NPG's Moscow leadership has now taken on many characteristics of the pro-government union officialdom it sought to replace, though serving Yeltsin rather than "actually existing socialism". While rank and file miners have lost their pay packets, benefits and job security, the NPG leaders have developed close relations with government bodies and with the Moscow office of the right-wing US labour federation, the AFL-CIO.
With considerable reluctance, the Moscow leaders of the NPG endorsed the March 1 protest and accepted that members of the union would take part. But when NPG local organisations in Vorkuta called for the resignation of the government and for new presidential elections, the reaction from the all-Russian leadership appears to have been furious. The regional NPG organisation in Vorkuta eventually adopted a vote of no confidence in the Moscow leadership, and there is talk of a coming split.
Meanwhile, in a long series of mining centres, local activists of the two coal unions worked together closely to organise the stoppage.
So far, the strikers' warning to the government has gone unheeded; there is no indication that the rate of debt payments will be stepped up, or that the proposed subsidies will be increased.
Preparations are therefore under way for a longer stoppage, which will probably begin on March 20. This time, officials of both unions will be hard put to stop political demands from featuring prominently.