By Boris Kagarlitsky
MOSCOW — During this northern spring, a strike wave has rolled across Russia. This has now become a tradition. The problems forcing workers to protest are generally the same: failure to pay wages, declining production and the resulting threat of job losses, and the rise in the cost of living. In response to the demands of the unions, the government serves up a helping of promises and takes a few hasty measures to relieve the situation.
This time, however, we may have reached a kind of watershed. As in the past, the first to rise up have been the miners. Until now the government has exploited the fact that the miners' movement is split. Leaders of the Independent Union of Miners (NPG) have appealed constantly for people to support the "reformers" in the government, and have sought to frighten people with talk of a "nomenklatura revanche" which is supposed to be in prospect if workers enter into conflict with the bosses.
But after two years of "reforms", people have developed an immunity to this kind of demagogy. During March not only rank and file members of the NPG, but also a number of influential local leaders of the union picketed government offices in Moscow together with members of the Union of Coal Industry Workers. The latter is part of the country's main union body, the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR).
Next after the coal industry workers came a picket by nuclear power workers. Then workers from the ZiL automobile plant took their turn outside the government building and, finally, metallurgical workers.
Literally, not a day goes by without reports of pickets and strikes. Strike committees are being established in the labour collectives. Oil workers have set up an all-Russian strike committee, and preparations are under way for founding an inter-regional strike committee in western Siberia. At a conference of FNPR union activists on April 14, the majority of speakers observed a need for more determined and energetic measures.
Differences between "traditional" and "new" trade unions are no longer playing a role, so far as most activists are concerned. People who only recently attacked the FNPR for conservatism and "resistance to the reforms" are themselves now being forced to put up resistance. It is typical that even traditionally prosperous branches of industry (the oil industry, for example) are now in crisis. Even banking workers will soon find out for themselves what it means to suffer job losses.
Individual enterprises and even sectors of the economy can no longer solve their problems independently. The entire economy is flat on its back. The policy of patching holes is not working. Privatisation has led to a dramatic fall in the efficiency of production, and to a catastrophic fall in capital investments.
The process of modernising and developing production has virtually ceased. Unemployment has become a serious problem, though the majority of the active population still have work. If the collapse of industry is not halted, the situation will get dramatically worse. And this means that workers are in danger not just of being without wages at the end of the year, but also without jobs.
The question is no longer one of altering this or that decision of the government; the whole course of economic policy needs to be changed.
Trade union leaders and the heads of strike committees understand this perfectly. Political demands are being raised constantly at trade union conferences and meetings. Usually, the call is for Yeltsin to resign and for new elections to be held, and for a new government to be formed.
If deputies to the parliament do not show a readiness to fight for changes, the dissatisfaction will also turn against them. Unlike the old Supreme Soviet, which many saw as a parallel power, the new State Duma is perceived as an ineffective, decorative organ with little influence. The deputies will hardly be able to win the trust and support of workers with endless discussions on topics that are incomprehensible to the bulk of the population.
In order to win the confidence of workers, politicians have to live with workers' problems and participate in their struggles. This is not happening. It is typical that when the miners picketed the government offices in Moscow, none of the leaders of the "parliamentary left" found the time to go and talk to them, even though the Duma building is only 50 metres away.
Several rank and file deputies from the Communist Party came, as did an independent deputy from the Kuzbass, Sergei Burkov. But no-one else.
The political games of the opposition are turning out to have as little relation to the problems of the bulk of workers as the intrigues of the government. People who have not received their wages for several months are demanding clear, specific answers. How can the omnipotence of the banks be ended? How can state regulation of the economy be reimposed? How can people's job security be ensured, something that needs to be done immediately?
By agreeing to sign Yeltsin's Pact on Social Accord, the FNPR leadership has also placed itself in a difficult situation. "Wildcat" strikes will inevitably begin breaking out, and FNPR members will take an active part in them. The leaders of the union federation will be faced with a choice: either to break the pact together with their members (who never approved of the decision to sign the document anyway), or to attack their own activists for the benefit of the government.
The traditions of the labour movement in Russia have either been destroyed, or formalised and deadened; as a result, everything is having to begin afresh, with activists often being forced to "invent the bicycle". Inevitably, lessons that were well known to the compilers of the old Soviet textbooks are being relearned. This is the case with the participation of workers' organisations in political struggle.
Until now, the labour movement has done its utmost to avoid direct participation in politics, with the FNPR taking a very guarded attitude to political parties.
The reasons are obvious if we take into account not only 70 years of Communist Party control over the trade unions, but also the efforts by "democratic" politicians to manipulate the workers' movement in the years from 1989 to 1991. Not surprisingly, worker activists now show an extremely guarded attitude to politicians, whom they suspect of trying to use them yet again.
The ultraleftists and nationalists who have shown up at the gates of the ZiL plant have been met without enthusiasm. Members of the fascist Russian National Unity have also failed to find a common language with the miners. After hanging around the pickets, the fascists made off, daubing the following slogan on a fence: "Miners — your main enemy is Zionism!" The picketers, whose wages were being withheld not by the government of Israel but by their own government, were not impressed.
In the present critical situation, solutions can be found to economic problems only by using political means. The strike committees are more and more becoming independent organs with their own political identities. They are unlikely to allow themselves to be manipulated, but neither will they remain "outside of politics".
If neither political parties, nor Duma deputies, nor the numerous claimants to the presidential post are able to present workers with an attractive alternative, the workers' movement will be left with only one option: to found its own, independent political organisation.