By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — For Russian trade unions, the coup d'etat launched and consolidated by President Boris Yeltsin between September 21 and October 4 dramatically increased the difficulties of defending jobs, wages, social benefits and working conditions. This was a key lesson that emerged from the first major labour movement gathering since the coup — an extraordinary congress on October 28 of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR).
With more than 50 million members, the FNPR is by far the largest labour movement organisation in Russia.
Inheriting the membership, property and many of the organisers and officials of the old Soviet trade unions, the FNPR since its founding in 1990 has undergone a partial and inconsistent reform. It has had to try to develop the functions familiar to trade unions in the West — pursuing grievance struggles, carrying on collective bargaining with management and devising action programs to take the defence of workers' rights into the national political arena.
This last function has earned the FNPR the bitter enmity of the Yeltsin administration. During the first half of this year, the government routinely ignored the tripartite commission which was supposed to provide a framework for settling disputes. Meanwhile, the Finance Ministry's efforts to impose tight-money policies included delaying the payment of funds needed for enterprises to pay wages. As a result, huge numbers of workers were receiving their wages two, three or even four months late — in conditions of near-hyperinflation.
In June, strikes began breaking out. In July, the tempo of struggle accelerated, and by early September well over a million Russian workers had taken part in strikes or other forms of protest action. The FNPR leaders responded by drawing up a "Program of Collective Action" meant to culminate during October in still more widespread strikes, pickets and demonstrations.
Opposed coup
When Yeltsin threw legality to the winds and abolished the parliament on September 21, FNPR leaders bitterly condemned the move. This was not because the union federation had particular links to powerful figures from the former Soviet apparatus. On the contrary, the old Soviet apparatchiks were now very often facing union leaders across the negotiating tables, having transformed themselves into Yeltsin staffers or nomenklatura capitalists.
FNPR leaders recognised that Yeltsin's actions in overthrowing the parliament and ignoring the Constitutional Court could do nothing to help build a democratic society in which workers' rights were respected. The union leaders also gauged correctly that the old parliament, for all its vices, was more likely to enact policies in the interests of the mass of Russians than a Yeltsin dictatorship steeped in neo-liberal dogmas and freed from all democratic constraints.
An expanded FNPR plenum on September 28 voted to endorse the condemnation of Yeltsin's coup. That same day, a presidential decree stripped the unions of their traditional control over the funds out of which workers receive disability payments, holiday vouchers and a variety of other welfare benefits. At the same time, the government made clear that unless the unions' attitude became more accommodating, the automatic deduction of union dues from pay packets would be banned.
When Yeltsin sent in tanks to blast away the parliament, the relationship of forces in Russia shifted dramatically against working people. The division of powers that had prevented the president from unleashing the full force of his neo-liberal schemes, and which had obliged him to limit his attacks on the labour movement, was no more; gerrymandered elections to a new "toy telephone" legislature would not restore it.
Repression
Liberal ideologues began demanding that the FNPR be forcibly disbanded, and its property confiscated. The pressures on individual unions became intense, and strike plans were quietly buried. As a scapegoat, the less resolute union leaders offered up FNPR chairperson Igor Klochkov, who had been closely identified with the "Plan of Collective Action" and had called for mobilisations to defend the parliament building. Klochkov resigned on October 7.
During the weeks that followed, the main acts of repression against the labour movement took place in the provinces, as Yeltsin's hand-picked local administrative chiefs settled old scores with union bodies. In Tula, south of Moscow, a trade union paper was shut down. In nearby Voronezh, the building of the provincial trade union council was "nationalised".
At the national level, the FNPR leadership dropped earlier plans for the federation to join in election campaigning as part of a "Russian Union of Labour", alongside parties of the democratic left.
It was no time for rash initiatives, but the caution of many union leaders was drifting over into potentially self-defeating efforts to appease the regime. This was apparent when the FNPR's extraordinary congress — called originally with a view to coordinating union protest actions — finally convened. Throughout the day's proceedings, not a word was said to characterise the coup and the events that had followed.
In the report by Moscow Federation of Trade Unions chairperson Mikhail Shmakov, who had taken over as acting chair of the FNPR, the methods of the former leadership — "direct pressure on the government" — were seen as having failed. The labour movement, Shmakov acknowledged, "should not reject all forms of collective action". But at the present stage, he argued, it was "probably more effective to concentrate on honest, businesslike negotiations and on honestly carrying out the agreements reached".
Shmakov, who has introduced many necessary reforms to the Moscow unions, had no intention of leading an across-the-board retreat. If direct confrontations with the government had to be avoided, he maintained, it was still necessary to push ahead on other fronts. Above all, the unions had to lead a fight for economic democracy, "that is, for a social order in which workers participate in deciding the conditions of their labour and its payment, in determining the fate of enterprises, in shaping government economic policy and in providing social benefits".
Shmakov also proposed to carry out a far-reaching reform of the structures of the FNPR. This was to end the federation's role as a centralised command structure and to turn it into a body providing services to trade unions and coordinating their activity. The shift was to be symbolised by changing the organisation's name to "All-Russian Confederation of Labour (All-Russian Association of Trade Unions)".
The congress rejected the symbolism, but paradoxically, accepted the substance: voting against a new name, the delegates adopted a new version of the FNPR's charter under which the range of issues falling within the competence of the federation's central bodies was sharply curtailed. On all but a small number of questions related to membership and dues payments, resolutions of the central bodies would now have only the force of recommendations.
Elections
The question of participating in Yeltsin's December 12 elections was not avoided entirely. Regional union organisations were urged to consider supporting slates that contained union members and which were campaigning on pro-labour policies.
The restructuring of the FNPR represents an encouraging step toward the creation of democratic unions with a high degree of involvement by rank and file members.
Nevertheless, the initiatives urged by Shmakov — who at the end of the proceedings was elected unopposed as the FNPR's new chairperson — have the limitations of reforms from above that are backed only to a very modest degree by rank and file activism. In sectoral and territorial union bodies throughout Russia, the work of renovating bureaucratised Soviet-era structures and of developing new middle-level leaderships has still barely begun.
Meanwhile, there is no reason to think that further retreats before the Yeltsin regime's anti-labour onslaught will allow the unions to survive and reconstruct. Yeltsin could not unleash the full force of his monetarist policies while leaving parliamentary democracy in place. He will not be able to do it while allowing active, representative trade unions to exist either.