Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 5 – Workers in Russia
are increasingly engaged in various forms of labor action, although most of
these are not monitored by the government or attended to by the media or
politicians; and ever more of these actions are the result of growing wage
arrears, again a trend that official statistics underreport because they do not
include the “black” economy.
In March, Ivan Ovsyannikov says,
Rosstat reported that less than one percent of all workers had money owed to
them for their work, some 63,000 in all, and that their unpaid back wages
amounted to only 3.6 billion rubles (60 million US dollars) (провэд.рф/society/social-organizations/42011-kak-lyudi-bopyutsya-za-svoyu-zapplatu-v-possii.html).
Experts
and activists say that the real numbers are far larger and even recall the
horrific cases of the 1990s. As evidence, they point the increasing number of
strikes and other actions, including violence against business owners and
suicides, that workers have undertaken in the hopes of getting the money they
are owed.
The
journalist cites Elena Gerasimov, the head of the Lawyers for Labor Rights Association,
as saying that the primary reason wage arrears are underreported now is that
about 15 million workers are now employed in the “black” sector of the economy.
They are not counted by the state for most purposes, and they enjoy far fewer
legal protections.
The
aristocracy of Russian workers now consists of those employed by foreign
corporations. Below them are those employed by companies with foreign
ties. And at the very bottom are those
in the “black” segment of the marketplace who are working for other companies
rather than for the state. The latter
arrangement gives workers some leverage.
There
is one major difference between the wage arrears of the 1990s and those now. In
the earlier period, most of the wages not paid were simply pocketed by managers
and owners for their own purposes. Now, in many cases, owners are putting the
money they keep from workers back into the company, leading many workers to
assume that this is just the way things now are.
Recently,
the Moscow Center for Economic and Political Reforms said that last year there
were 1141 cases of worker conflict, 79.4 percent of which involved wage
arrears. Not all these cases led to strikes, but in the 419 which did, slightly
over half – 54 percent – were about workers not having been paid. These figures
were twice as bad as three years earlier.
When
workers strike or complain to government officials, they are often successful
in getting the money they are owed. More
important, activists say, almost all successful efforts become models for
others in neighboring areas. That is because success spreads via word of mouth
given that the official media often doesn’t report such actions.
One
intriguing finding of the center’s research: ethnic Russians are far less
likely to take action to get the pay they are owed than are Central Asian gastarbeiters. According to Ovsvannikov, the reason is this:
Russians can quit and change jobs far more easily than can the Central Asians.
The latter thus have few choices but to stand and fight.
Such
labor actions rarely attract the support of opposition parties because they see
little chance of politicizing the movement, even though many of these parties
talk constantly about the need for the refrigerator to defeat the
television. They are making a mistake,
activists say, because worker solidarity by itself has a political meaning.
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