By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Electricity generating workers in the Maritime District of Russia's far east are locked in a battle with federal and local authorities to force the payment of long-overdue wages. Power output in the district, whose capital is the port city of Vladivostok, is reportedly down to about a quarter of capacity. Blackouts of up to 16 hours a day are commonplace.
Officially banned from striking, the 16,000 power workers have stopped maintenance work and the stockpiling of supplies. At two power stations, 200 workers have just ended a 16-day hunger strike.
The struggle began in late July, when hundreds of workers at the Primorsky power station near Luchegorsk, north-east of Vladivostok, began a hunger strike to demand wages which had not been paid in full for as much as five months. Their employer, the regional energy authority Dalenergo, claimed that it could not pay wages because it was owed huge sums by defaulting debtors, largely defence industry plants and military bases dependent on the federal budget.
Dalenergo was also failing to pay for coal supplies, and its debt to the coal industry helped precipitate a strike from late July by most of the Maritime District's coal miners. The labour struggles were suspended after the federal government promised funds to pay off the arrears.
While pledging money, the federal authorities did their best to deflect blame onto the administration of district Governor Yevgeny Nazdratenko. Originally appointed governor by President Boris Yeltsin in 1993, Nazdratenko has combined populist measures with a gift for apparatus infighting to build one of the most powerful local bureaucratic machines in Russia.
Careful to serve the central government's basic political needs (he is the local chief of the pro-government bloc Our Home Is Russia) and with influential Kremlin allies, he has won the Maritime District a relatively large share of the shrinking pool of state subsidies.
At the same time, Nazdratenko has agitated freely against Moscow's economic policies. His reputation as a defender of local economic interests, together with a scare campaign against Chinese immigrants, helped him to an overwhelming victory in the governorship elections in December 1995.
However, Nazdratenko has few friends among the power workers, many of whom believe that racketeering by administration officials and Dalenergo executives has siphoned off money that might have been used to pay wages.
In mid-August Yeltsin publicly rebuked Nazdratenko over the crisis in the energy complex and gave him a month to solve the problems. The manager of Dalenergo was sacked, as was Nazdratenko's deputy governor.
Yeltsin's show of outrage during August has not extended to making sure that the federal government meets all its commitments to workers in the region. The power workers were promised that their arrears for May and June would be paid by August 30. The timetable was not kept.
Meanwhile, Dalenergo was hit hard by the near-total cut-off of federal payments to the district's many defence-related installations as Moscow struggled to pay off the huge sums borrowed to finance Yeltsin's election campaign handouts. Unpaid electricity bills mounted.
On September 3 about 70 workers at the Primorsky plant began a hunger strike. This was later joined by many more workers, including a number at a power plant near the city of Artem.
On September 13, a meeting of representatives of energy workers demanded that Nazdratenko and his administration resign, and that the district be placed under direct presidential rule. "Without federal intervention, the Maritime District will not survive the winter", local power workers' union leader Gennady Tkachuk was quoted as saying.
With the power workers promising district-wide protest action from September 16, speculation mounted that Yeltsin would try to remove Nazdratenko. However, the governor remained in his post, saved apparently by his continuing usefulness to high-placed Moscow patrons, and by doubts that the Constitutional Court would endorse the sacking of an elected governor.
Meanwhile, the power workers were unmoved by promises from Nazdratenko that all back wages would be paid within two weeks. From September 16, the bans on maintenance and stockpiling went into force; to mark the occasion, about 500 workers demonstrated in Vladivostok. The normally intensive process of preparing to deliver electricity supplies during the winter came to a near halt. To limit adverse public reaction, the additional blackouts were concentrated on debtor enterprises.
As the hunger strike entered its third week, emaciated power workers were being taken to hospital. Nazdratenko flew to Moscow to meet with federal officials. On September 21 it was reported that the central government had agreed to start transferring the equivalent of US$35 million to Dalenergo, enough to cover the enterprise's wage debts and to begin securing fuel supplies for the winter.
The power workers have vowed to continue their action until the payment of wage arrears actually begins and a timetable for full reimbursement is worked out.
The Russian government has followed its customary strategy when it finds workers with economic muscle putting up a fight: it pays existing debts and makes promises of future payments — promises that are usually ignored once the militancy subsides. Using this method, the government for years has rotated a large wage debt around various economic sectors, buying off struggles in one area with the money saved by failing to meet commitments elsewhere.
This approach is subject to constraints. With elections of governors due in many areas during the next three months, the federal authorities have a strong incentive to try to prevent wage arrears from sparking really large labour protests that could lead to the growth of effective political opposition movements.
Real action to limit the growth of wage arrears, however, clashes with the government's priority of slashing state spending in order to restrict the budget deficit and meet the stiff anti-inflation targets set by the International Monetary Fund as a condition for credits.
After stabilising for a period during the presidential election campaign, the sum owed in overdue wages has risen swiftly to a level put by trade union sources at the "astronomical" figure of 40 trillion roubles, the equivalent of almost US$7.5 billion. This is close to a month of the total wage bill of workers in Russia.
One side or the other must now seize the initiative and reorder the situation to its fundamental advantage. Perhaps grasping this point, numerous groups of workers have held protest actions during recent weeks. Particularly active have been civilian employees of the Ministry of Defence. The ministry claims that it received only 4% of its funding for July salaries, and none at all for August.
On September 19 some 1500 workers blocked the headquarters of the navy's Pacific Fleet in Vladivostok. In Moscow, about 500 civilian Defence Ministry workers picketed the main government office building. Warning strikes and other protest actions took place at naval shipyards in Murmansk, weapons factories in St Petersburg and elsewhere.
At a press conference on September 18, Mikhail Shmakov, the chairperson of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, stated that unless the government came up with a satisfactory response, the federation would be "forced to call for an all-Russian warning strike in all branches of industry on October 10, and from approximately November 1, to begin a full-scale economic strike".