Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 8 – Anyone watching
Moscow television would conclude that “there is no more important news than the
situation in Ukraine and the intrigues of NATO,” Olga Filina says in today’s “Ogonyok,”
but those who follow Russia’s labor market say that “the most important news”
involves the spread of protests by workers who haven’t been paid.
Although largely unnoticed by most
Russians, miners, metal workers and even those employed by the government are
staging strikes in a spontaneous fashion rather than under the aegis of trade
unions or parties, a pattern that recalls the way in which Solidarity emerged
in Poland, Filina points out (kommersant.ru/doc/2557403).
According to the Moscow Center for
Social-Labor Rights, there are now slightly more than one new strike every
working day somewhere in Russia, increasingly about wage arrears and reflecting
growing social dissatisfaction. The declining role of unions means that these
strikes can develop in unpredictable ways.
That trend represents a departure
from what had been the case between 2010 and 2013 when labor actions were “not ‘wild’
but institutionalized,’” Peter Bizyukov of the Center says. Now, workers are
acting on their own and making the kind of demands for immediate recompense
that their unions had often avoided.
Statistics bear this out, Filina
says. In 2013, 42 percent of labor actions involved complaints about how
companies were operating; in the first six months of this year, “50 percent of
the protests were not coordinated by the trade unions and were in essence
spontaneous protests,” up from 35 percent only 12 months ago.
The labor ministry has developed new
legislation that will increase fines on those companies which owe their workers
back wages, but as the “Ogonyek” journalist notes, “experts are not certain”
that this will help or prevent more Pikalevos. That required Putin’s personal
intervention, but there is no “instrument available for saving the workers of
the entire country.”
Karin Kleman, director of the
Collective Action Institute and a researcher at St. Petersburg State Humanities
University, says that what is happening now recalls the events of the early
1990s, but there are two important differences: the trade unions established
then have been destroyed, and the workers are much less patient than they were.
Biryukov says that “the dramatic
nature of the situation is reflected in the fact that the authorities paradoxically
are devoting less attention to information about the protests. We have no open
official data on the real level of conflicts” in Russia. Rosstat, for instance, records only “actions
carried out according to the law,” a tiny fraction of all labor actions.
According to the data that his
center has collected, Biryukov says, the number and size of those areas in
which spontaneous strikes could break out are growing rapidly and what is
perhaps especially frightening is that they now involve not just workers at
private companies but in government agencies and offices and in the large
service sector.
As Filin notes, “Poland’s Solidarity
movement began as a labor conflict and the new Russian arose at a time of the anger
of miners.” That is, “unresolved ‘worker’
issues can quickly become political questions.”
And that is more likely, they suggest, when people feel desperate enough
to act on their own, fighting not just for wages but for life itself.
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