Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 23 – Long haul truck
drivers from Daghestan, Ryazan, Saratov, Orenburg and St. Petersburg converged
on Moscow over the weekend only to be blocked near the Russian capital by the
police and OMON forces, charged with failing to obey traffic officers and fined
or remanded to the courts.
Because the central
government-controlled media have not covered this latest labor action, details
are only coming to the surface now; but such reports show that Moscow’s claims
that the strike has exhausted itself, is over and that there is no need for
negotiations are baseless (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/303106/).
The drivers had come to Moscow in
order to support their union representatives who were scheduled to have a
meeting with transportation ministry officials under the auspices of the Presidential
Council for the Development of Civil Society, but at the last minute as before,
the transportation ministry refused to take part.
The Council’s working group on the
strike issued a declaration saying that the large size of the truckers’ strike
and “the general worsening” of economic conditions in the industry are “the result
of insufficiently thought-through measures carried out by the government and
branch agencies.”
The group called for holding “in the
immediate future,” a special session of the Council on the problems surrounding
the resolution of the conflict” between the drivers and the government. The transportation ministry has not yet
reacted to this call, but it seems unlikely that it will agree to take part.
Indeed, in the past 24 hours, there
has been a general hardening of the government’s position against the drivers,
with some media outlets seeking to blame the truckers for the absence of
repairs to the roads (1istochnik.ru/news/33516)
and others suggesting that the West opposes the drivers (gosnovosti.com/2017/05/европарламент-уничтожает-дальнобойщ/).
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