Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 28 – “The
arbitrariness of factory owners [who openly manipulate the bankruptcy system],
the indifference of the authorities, and a legal system that does not defend
workers” is prompting ever more working class groups in the extremely depressed
Urals region to use hunger strikes to press their case, according to media
reports from that area.
Writing for the Rosbalt.ru news
agency this week, Dmitry Remizov says that “the hunger strike is becoming a
negative ‘trend’ of the industries of the Urals,” with workers at factories
bankrupt or threatened with bankruptcy and who have not been paid using it to
press officials, sometimes but not always with success (www.rosbalt.ru/federal/2012/10/25/1050467.html).
Worker protests in the Urals,
Remizov continues, are “not outbursts of dissatisfaction with problems at
particular enterprises but the result of the depressed situation in industry”
in that region. Growing wage payment
arrears in the factories which remain open and the closing of plants with
little thought to the fate of their employees are powering hunger strikes.
Sometimes these tragedies are the
result of “objective” economic factors like shortages of orders, but often they
reflect the “arbitrary” use of bankruptcy laws and the authorities
unwillingness to press the owners to pay their workers what they are owed, the
Rosbalt journalist says.
According to court records, 849
firms in Sverdlovsk oblast were in bankruptcy proceedings in 2011, and 527 more
entered bankruptcy in the first half of 2012. According to the procuracy, there
were an additional 68 enterprises which owed some 8,000 workers 409 million
rubles (13 million US dollars).
The regional ombudsman, Remizov says,
has stated that “the procuracy and the police cannot or do not want to take any
steps” regarding such owners.
In many cases, Russia’s federal laws are
on their side. “According to the federal
law on bankruptcy, demands for the payment of labor and associated costs are
satisfied only after the completion of settling accounts with creditors and tax
organizations and after the satisfaction of extraordinary demands for current
payments.”
What this “in fact means,” the ombudsman
Tatyana Merzlyakova continues, is that the workers get nothing. “This is a violation of the rights not only
of the workers but of the members of their families because typically wage
payments are the only source of income for a
worker’s
family.”
Organizers
of the wood workers union say that as a result, “people have no money: debts
for communal services continue to grow, there is no money for buying fuel for
stoves – the majority of workers live in badly constructed housing), there is
no change to purchase winter clothes for children, no means for purchasing
medicine or obtaining medical help.”
Workers in a Perm factory now shut
down staged a hunger strike on September 28. The next day, Kray Governor Viktor
Basargin “personally asked the workers to cease their action having promised
them that their back wages would be paid.”
A small amount was given to them by October 6, but only a fraction of
what they are owed.
The workers renewed their hunger
strike on October 21, and other workers who find themselves in similar straits
have announced plans to join them on November 1.
Serious wage arrears, a collapsing
economy, and the human problems they cause are things Russian President
Vladimir Putin has portrayed himself as having overcome. But for the hunger strikers in the Urals, the
president’s PR efforts are falling on deaf ears, even if they are accepted by
those who have never looked beyond Moscow’s ring road.
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