By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — If you hadn't had a pay packet in months, would you be holding off from protest action in order to avoid embarrassing the ruling authorities before the next elections?
Probably not, and workers in Russia aren't doing so either. As campaigning intensified for the June 16 presidential elections, strikes and other protests continued breaking out at numerous points around the country. The participants included coal and nickel miners, power station employees and port and shipyard workers.
Even drivers and other employees of the garage in the Moscow Kremlin sent a letter to President Boris Yeltsin demanding that their salaries be paid on time.
Most Russians have had to scour the press, looking for brief items on inside pages, in order to learn of the ferment. Unpaid workers may not have been overly concerned for Yeltsin's chances on June 16, but the editors of most of Moscow's large dailies were determined to see the president back in office.
Early this year, Yeltsin made a much-publicised pledge to clear wage debts to state employees by the end of March. Many "budget sphere" workers, from teachers and research scientists to nurses and weather forecasters, at last began receiving their back wages. The March target was not met, but the State Statistical Committee put the fall during April in wage debts associated with shortages of government financing at 29%.
Yeltsin has had to admit that many gaps remain in the effort to meet the government's payroll. These failures have been blamed on corrupt provincial officials, even if the rumblings from the president's own garage suggest that the fault may lie closer to the centre of power.
Meanwhile, the overall sum owed to workers has scarcely diminished. The Moscow newspaper Finansovye Izvestia on June 4 quoted official statistics showing that total wage debts late in April were only 1% below the figure a month earlier. If the position with "budget sphere" debts had improved, the newspaper observed, non-state wage debts had grown sharply during the same period, almost cancelling out the improvement.
Yeltsin may have won back the votes of some of the state's own disgruntled employees, but there are millions of other workers for whom the only change on the pay scene in the past few months has been for the worse.
The picture has been especially bleak in Russia's Far East, and it is here that the response has been most militant. On June 5, Izvestia reported that coal miners and electricity generating workers had demonstrated in front of the regional administration building in Vladivostok. The main target of this protest, which Izvestia described as a "well-organised joint mass action", was wage delays of four to five months.
The miners were also protesting at the grim accident record in the local coal industry, a situation due largely to lack of funds for proper maintenance.
From June 1, the newspaper reported, miners in the Far East had ceased loading coal for the region's thermal power stations. This move had the support of the power station workers, who planned a region-wide strike for June 10. Local officials were reported to be sending alarmed warnings to Moscow of "openly anti-Yeltsin moods" in labour collectives.
Also in the Far East, several thousand workers from the Amur shipbuilding plant demonstrated in the city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur on May 15. The workers reportedly had received no pay for several months.
At the Norilsk nickel complex in the far north of Siberia, labour struggles reached a peak in mid-May after management had failed to pay wages owing from as far back as February.
Norilsk Nickel is the third-largest enterprise in Russia, and potentially among the most profitable. Nevertheless, the failure of the complex directors to keep wage payments up to date has brought a long string of hunger strikes and protest meetings. On May 16 Izvestia reported that workers in the Oktyabrsky mine, the region's largest, had gone on strike.
In the December parliamentary elections, Izvestia remarked, workers at Norilsk voted strongly for "democratic" candidates; Communists had received little support. Since then, the paper lamented, the mood in the workers' settlements had "swung around".
In central European Russia, some 3700 workers at the Novovoronezhskaya nuclear power plant threatened strike action on June 4 if their wages were not paid. Rejecting a payment plan advanced by management, employees began a protest sit-in.
In Vladimir province, east of Moscow, hundreds of workers from the Gorokhovets shipping yard blocked the main Moscow-Nizhny Novgorod highway for several hours on June 5. The yard reportedly owes wages from as far back as December 1994.
Signs have also appeared that coal miners in Rostov province in southern Russia will soon return to struggle. In late January, these workers were at the centre of a massive fight by coal industry employees for guaranteed wage payments. Since witnessing the miners in action, the government has been wary of breaking its promises to the coal industry. With exceptions, as in the Far East, miners have been receiving their pay.
The economic situation in the coal regions remains so dire, however, that miners are now discussing plans to step up their political activity.
In late April the second conference of the main miners' union, the Russian Union of Coal Industry Workers, adopted a resolution on the political situation in Russia. The resolution observed the lack of success of the government's "reforms", and noted with approval that "coal industry workers have involved themselves in political struggle for the election of their representatives to organs of power at all levels".
Late in May, a Rostov provincial conference of the union resolved that members in the region were dissatisfied with their positions, and were "not in agreement with the present course of the economic reforms conducted by the government of the Russian Federation". The conference went on to express no confidence in Yuri Malyshev, the head of the newly formed Russian Coal Company, and to demand his resignation.
As these instances show, Russia is home to large numbers of workers who are not fooled that simply ticking a square on June 16 will solve their problems. Whoever wins the elections, independent labour struggles in Russia are certain to resume, and their tempo and determination can be expected to increase.