By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — For the head of administration in the Bykovsky region of Volgograd province on January 28, there could be no doubt that local teachers were angry at having been denied their pay since August. The teachers barricaded him into his office and refused to let him out until the early hours of the following morning.
As many as 500,000 Russian teachers — about one-third of the profession — took part in national protests in the last week of January. They demanded wages that in some cases had not been paid since the early months of 1998. According to the Trade Union of Popular Education and Science Workers (TUPESW), about 300,000 teachers were on strike for all or part of January 27, the first of three days of coordinated action.
The national protests capped an extraordinary period of struggle since Russian schools were due to resume operating on January 11, following the New Year holidays. As reported by the TUPESW, between January 11 and 25, about 120,000 teachers took part in a total of 2599 local strikes in 33 of Russia's 88 provinces, republics and districts. In at least four regions, teachers declared hunger strikes, and in many centres pickets were placed on local administrative offices.
As of December, teachers' salaries were paid up in full in only six of the 88 "subjects of the federation". In late January, according to the TUPESW, the average teacher in Russia was owed 2.2 months' pay. In the Altai district in Siberia, the newspaper Segodnya reported on January 15, it was eight months.
Passing the buck
The ability of the Russian state to make economies at the expense of teachers has owed much to buck-passing between the various levels of government. Formally, paying the school system's bills is the responsibility of the municipalities and rural regions. But in most parts of Russia, local governments are nearly destitute, and in some cases contributed nothing to teachers' wages during 1998.
The burden of paying teachers has been taken up, haphazardly, by the provincial and federal levels of government. To almost the same degree as the local administrations, most of the provincial and republican governments are chronically short of money.
The federal government has undertaken to provide 50% of the cost of paying teachers, and has generally met this commitment. But the federal funding is not tied, and authorities at the lower levels can use it at their discretion. In the city of Artyom in the Russian far east, leaders of the TUPESW reported during November that teachers had received only one-sixth of the money sent to the local administration for their wages.
Local officials have sometimes had good reason to redirect money meant for teachers, for example to cope with life-threatening situations such as a shortage of money for heating cities during winter. But it is rarely possible to be sure whether funds for teachers' wages have been re-routed to stave off social catastrophe or to line the pockets of the officials' business associates.
The teachers' protest movement that has grown out of this situation has been highly dispersed. Typically, teachers have aimed their strikes and pickets against local authorities they believe are robbing them. The local officials, meanwhile, have been quick to claim that the fault lies higher up, with the provincial or republican governments.
The latter have often sought to use the fragmented nature of the movement to lower the general temperature of protest. Within individual "subjects of the federation", the Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta noted on January 28, governors or presidents have tried to limit protests by keeping the wage backlog of city teachers relatively small. Meanwhile, teachers in country areas have received almost nothing.
A Russia-wide movement
It has taken time for teachers to broaden the forms of their struggle, and to pitch their demands higher up the scale of government irresponsibility. But by last autumn, local protests were coalescing into province-wide strike waves. City teachers were giving active support to their country colleagues.
The shift to coordinated Russia-wide actions is a logical extension of this process. By making education funding a national political issue, teachers' leaders hope to reduce the leeway for governments at all levels to skimp on the education wage bill.
Even before the actions of January 27-29, teachers' protests had already had a marked impact on public opinion. On January 26, the newspaper Trud reported a survey indicating that 89% of Russians thought teachers had the right to take protest action such as strikes.
Governments are taking note; since the beginning of the year, Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported on January 28, 3.5 billion roubles (about US$152 million) for education workers had been transferred from federal sources. As the national days of action neared, long-overdue wages began to be paid in a series of provincial areas.
TUPESW international secretary Nikolai Kalabashin told Green Left Weekly on January 28 that the total wage debt to teachers had fallen over the previous month.
An important part of the union's strategy now is to force the creation of a new system of school funding, one that no longer provides such scope for officials to divert cash and dodge the blame.
Union chairperson Vladimir Yakovlev points out that under the Russian constitution, education is the joint responsibility of the federal authorities and the subjects of the federation; no mention is made of the municipalities. The TUPESW plans to bring a Constitutional Court suit to force provincial governments to take direct control of paying teachers' wages.
Even if this goal is achieved, overall funding for education will still be gravely inadequate. The average monthly wage of a teacher, even when paid, is a nearly starvation level 576 roubles (US$26). The education union is pushing for this to be raised to equal the average wage in industry.
In the past, teachers have rarely aimed demands at the federal authorities. But it is only the federal government, with its ability to tax the huge and still-profitable oil and gas industries, that has the power to direct significant additional sums into the education system. Ultimately, teachers will not be able to leave President Yeltsin and Prime Minister Primakov outside their field of fire.
Federal spokespeople, meanwhile, deny that the central government bears any particular blame for the teachers' plight — and like officials in the provinces, suggest that the teachers aim their attacks elsewhere.
Federal finance minister Mikhail Zadornov in mid-January suggested cuts to federal funding for provinces and republics that failed to use money assigned for "budget sector" workers, including teachers, as intended.
Soon afterwards, education minister Vladimir Filippov urged the establishment of local commissions to monitor the spending of federal funds. "Included in these commissions would be teachers", the news service RFE/RL reported on January 29, "and local journalists would be asked to conduct their own investigations".
The suggestion that provincial newspapers would energetically seek out abuses by local authorities — without whose support they can rarely operate — is far-fetched. Nevertheless, Filippov's proposal contains the germ of a good idea.
The organisations that need to scrutinise the transfer of teachers' wage funds, however, are not tame-cat commissions. The task really belongs to the territorial bodies of the education union, operating independently of government authorities and armed with real powers to extract information.