Part One Russian Labour Studies and the Research Design

Part One Russian Labour Studies and the Research Design

Chapter 1 Post-Soviet Labour Relations in Russia: history, review and the research approach

1.1 The development of the new Russian labour movement

1.1.1 Labour organisation in the former Soviet Union

The union structure in Soviet times since then was concentrated in the hands of VTsSPS. Nevertheless, within the Party itself, union leaders and activists still raised several disputes confronting the party line over the role of trade unions in the socialist state. There might be some arguments about the interpretation of Lenin’s order on the role of trade unions, but it was clearly ruled out that the union should take direct control of enterprise production. From 1928, the leadership of VTsSPS faced serious suppression within the party. Stalin reinterpreted Lenin’s line on the control of trade unions, and most militant Bolshevik unionists were replaced by those who were more loyal to Stalin. After the full control of the Party, the VTsSPS had totally become the ‘transmission belt’ of the Party-state but no longer an independent organisation to defend workers’ interests. Since then, serious independent labour organisations or movements no longer existed. In addition, despite all the rhetorical assertion of its leadership on improving the role and function of trade union organisations, the Soviet trade union organisation received merely symbolic reforms to its structure.

The principles and functions of trade unions during the Soviet time also underwent little change. According to the CPSU’s conception of the role of the trade union in a ‘socialist’ society, Soviet workers employ themselves as the working class, participating in production without the existence of antagonistic classes. Following such a definition, soviet workers were all undifferentiated in the relations of production, and their task was to improve production forces to construct the historic future for humankind in the communist society. Therefore, whether directors, managers, skilled engineers, or cleaners, people who worked at the same enterprise were all enrolled in the same trade union organisation. The trade union structure was constructed according to the industrial principle, which was a parallel design of the managerial structure of the Soviet economic system. For example, as the Soviet railway project and service were managed and directed by the specific Ministry of Railway Transport, workers from enterprises of railway transport construction belonged to the Trade Union of Railway Workers and Transport Workers together with workers in railway transport services. Under such a principle, each industrial union had its own regional and primary organisations, and all these industry-based trade union organisations also needed to establish unity on different regional levels.

The functions of the Soviet trade union could be generalised with three aspects. Economically, the trade union in the soviet system was designed to participate in management and the fulfilment of the production plan. In which context, sometimes the trade union could be in charge of the employment plan of the enterprise. In most cases, Soviet unions performed state functions to promote productivity and labour discipline, which means that the union had the right to monitor cases in which workers were threatened with dismissal or demotion by the administration (Ruble 1981). Many analysts from the West had argued that Soviet trade unions at the enterprise level did not really stand for the workers’ interest but for the enterprise administration (Godson 1981; Connor 1991). Socially, the trade union organisations were to carry out the distribution of social benefits. From granting permission for visits to the hospital or sanatorium to the tickets provided for workers to send their children to summer (pioneer) camp, workers expected their membership of the trade union to provide them with such essential benefits. Politically, the union was controlled as an integral part of the Party-state, so that union leaders also needed to carry out the tasks of delivering political education to ordinary workers as well as to those selected as model workers. Moreover, the rule for union personnel generally confirmed such a function, as Ruble (1979, pp.72-73) pointed out,

‘Union officials at an enterprise of national significance are selected by their union’s central committee and receive Communist Party endorsement prior to the actual election… In all cases, the future career of a factory union chairman depends more upon the evaluation of his union superior than upon the evaluation of the workers’. According to all these factors, it is understandable that the Soviet trade union functionary was commonly seen as a part of the ‘nomenklatura’.

The commonly accepted role of the Soviet trade union encountered a critical moment of change when Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the CPSU in 1985. The country’s long-term economic stagnation moved him to consider carrying out more ‘reform’ polices. The original concern of his regime was to stimulate Soviet workers’ motivation in production. Gorbachev and his advisers asserted that to reach this goal the soviet system needed further ‘reform’ of production management. Generally, the grounds of his reform polices were around the conception of the implementation of ‘socialist self-government’. The idea was to release the power and responsibility of the central government to local or enterprise level, so that the enterprise was supposed to take more responsibility for raising production, while the improvement of the ‘bonus’ calculation system was also expected to support the motives of enterprise production. The reform was expected to link with the idea of providing workers more incentives to reach the target of the annual production plan.

According to the changes of Gorbachev’s reform idea and process, several new polices were introduced, which included ‘Reform of Payment System’ (1986), ‘Law on Co-operatives’ (1988) and ‘Law on State Enterprises (Organisation)’ (1988). Although these new polices aimed to stimulate soviet workers’ labour motivation by assigning freedom and rights of expressing their concern over their living and working conditions, the poor economic performance was not really improved. The reform then actually stimulated the launch of the new Russian labour movement, resulted from his new policies seemed more likely to meet contradictory situations as the immediate outcome. One group of arguments (Ticktin 1989; Walker 1993) believed that the immediate impact of Gorbachev’s economic reform, ironically, stimulated more unrest among workers, due to the fact that the very limited liberalization of the production of means of consumption started to cause disorder in the retail market. The economic and social conditions of ordinary workers had worsened, and most workers were concerned that their wages and benefits were no longer secure. The chaotic social atmosphere very soon provoked an upsurge of strikes and protests. At the beginning, the dissatisfaction and grievances among workers appeared in the use of traditional methods: sending letters to newspapers to publicise their demands; appeals to local Party organs to intervene in their problems. Nevertheless, the bureaucrats of the Party-state at the time did not yet realise the gravity of the situation and their responses turned out to be insufficient, which sharpened grievances among workers. The ongoing social unrest therefore showed that traditional methods of handling social-labour issues could no longer provide a solution.

Beginning from 1987, individual strikes started to arise. Following similar steps, spontaneous strike actions around the Soviet Union’s coalmining areas started to appear. According to the reports of Friedgut & Siegelbaum (1990), in March 1989, miners in the Donetsk coalmines refused to recognise the content of the collective agreement, and a short strike action was called immediately. Later on, the intense atmosphere between the workers and their administration started to spread into other coalmining areas. In July the same year, more and more miners from various coalmines called for strike action so that they could deliver a serious message for their demands to be heard by the government and the administration of the coal industry. During the strike actions, strike committees or workers’ committees were also established outside the traditional union organisations. In addition, it is important to note that the social and labour unrest had also developed alongside the democratic and nationalist movements at the time, and these forces immediately shook the authority of Gorbachev’s central government. More concretely, the leaders of the strike force in the Russian coalmine regions started to keep close contact with Boris Yeltsin’s political movement, in which they shared the common interest of taking apart the legitimacy of both the sovereignty and property of Gorbachev’s Soviet government. As part of the constituents of the CPSU and the Soviet government, VTsSPS had also become a central target of the new ‘independent’ movement.

One of the great legacies of the 1989 strike was the reform pressure on the Soviet trade union. However, it only meant an organisational change of the soviet trade union structure. Following the wave of miners’ strike and other labour unrest, the legitimacy of the official soviet trade union was shaken, and the VTsSPS trade union organisations faced various challenges to their own structures. Just like the term ‘perestroika’ for the society in Gorbachev’s era, this was the period of ‘reforming’ old union structures and also the formation of new unions. The reform of the VTsSPS union organisations started from the structural reconstitution, but very soon the power struggles and the rows over union property ownership among its regional and branch union organisations were also involved, together with ideological struggles which related to political positions. In September 1989, at the Sixth session of the Congress, VTsSPS decided to establish a republican union organisation based on the territory of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSFSR). The founding congress was held in Moscow on 21-23 March 1990 to complete the establishment of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR). Igor Klochkov, who had been a secretary of the Communist Party for years and had personal contact with Yeltsin during this period of his career, was elected as the president of FNPR. Meanwhile, more and more republican and branch union leaders were eager to transfer more power, as well as stronger legitimacy, from the central union organs into their own hands. Some VTsSPS leaders, like the president Vladimir Shcherbakov, wanted to maintain union structures under the framework of the Soviet Union, while recognising the new principle of greater autonomy for branch and republican union organisations. Following such an idea, at the 18^th session of Congress, October 1990, VTsSPS adopted its new name of General Confederation of Trade Unions (VKP), which was designated as the successor of VTsSPS. Nevertheless, like what had been happening on the political stage, the dynamic of disintegration had grown even stronger. Union leaders, especially those from union branches at republican level, had lost real interest in sharing their potential power (resources) under the united framework of VKP. The uneasy atmosphere between the VKP leadership and the leaders of branch and republican union organisations decided the fate of VKP. In reality, although VKP retained considerable property, the Confederation has functioned little more than as a platform for leaders of the former republican unions to exchange information about labour conditions and labour strategies. All these changes determined that the union power in Russia had only transferred into the hands of FNPR (Connor 1996, p.24).

Apart from the change within the old soviet trade union structure, which was partly a result of the leadership’s political opportunism, the atmosphere of the strike wave brought even stronger energy to workers who no longer put their faith into the VTsSPS union organisation. As for the development of new alternative trade unions, similar initiatives such as building up new labour groups started to spread over the territory of the Soviet Union. The scene in the coalmine areas seemed to present the most extraordinary story. The strike committees at coalmines had soon become workers’ committees and continued to function. In October 1990, at the second Congress of Coal miners of the USSR, after a chaotic split, an initiative presented by the leaders of the Kuzbass workers’ committee was adopted by those delegates who left the NRPUP-held meeting and held their own Congress. The resolution decided to establish a new trade union outside the official miners’ union, with the name of ‘Independent Miners’ Union’ (NPG). Following this resolution, the Russian miners held their own national congress in South-Sakhalinsk to form the Russian Independent Miners’ Union (NPGR). Alexander Sergeev, an electrician from Mezhdurechensk, was elected as president of the new trade union. The establishment of the Independent Miners’ Union of Russia (NPGR) has been seen as the landmark (milestone) of the new Russian labour movement. The activities of the new organisation also came to be seen as an indicator of labour activism in Russian society.

Actually, new trade union organisations had emerged even earlier. On 1 April 1989, about 30 activists from 10 regions and cities met in Moscow. The meeting decided to register as a public organisation and the first independent trade union association was establish. The Association took the name of ‘Association of Socialist Trade Unions SOTsPROF’.⁶ Notwithstanding the loose connection among its member trade unions, SOTsPROF had registered as the first trans-sector union confederation outside VTsSPS. With the atmosphere of ‘decentralism’, more and more new ‘free’ labour organisations outside the traditional structure started to be established. Apart from the energy sectors, these new unions mostly appeared in the transport sectors, such as aviation, railways, sea transport. There were many individual ‘free’ trade unions formed in manufacturing enterprises. Their initiators might form an informal group as the primary step and if the negotiation with the administration and official trade unions did not go successfully, they would establish a new union organisation or the whole group would separate from the official one as the only favourable solution. It is important to note (Cook 1997), many leaders of these new trade unions adopted a new principle for their membership, which should only recruit members on a professional basis; they insisted that the old industrial principle of the FNPR membership can not really distinguish the interests of different groups of workers, not to mention could learn how to defend the interests of the workers.

1.1.2 Confrontation between old trade unions and alternative unions

Yeltsin’s agenda of economic reform brought a further gap between the alternative and the FNPR trade unions. The alternative unions identified themselves with Yeltsin’s campaign. They had played a major role in supporting Yeltsin’s rise to power and gained comfortable connections to Yeltsin and his followers. Although FNPR’s president was on the side of Yeltsin in the August coup of 1991, the radical price liberalisation at the end of the year led to a sharp fall of living standards and threatened increased unemployment. Under the pressure of its branch organisations and also associated with the demands of their traditional partners – the industrialists of the state-owned sectors – FNPR defined itself as a ‘Constructive Opposition’, normally issuing warnings in opposition to Yeltsin’s polices. From the end of 1991 the leadership of FNPR gradually moved away from Yeltsin’s government.

Further anxious reaction arose in September 1992 when Yeltsin agreed to sign a decree to nationalise FNPR’s control of the state social insurance fund. In the confrontation between Yeltsin and the Congress of People’s Deputies in March 1993, the trade unions divided and clashed alongside political positions again. The alternative trade unions were generally on the side of Yeltsin, while FNPR stood aside calling for simultaneous elections for both parliament and president. The situation very soon led the FNPR leadership into confrontation with Yeltsin. The end of the parliamentary conflict in which Yeltsin emerged as the winner had an immediate impact on FNPR.

After the defeat of the White House, the leaders of FNPR were in fear of revenge from Yeltsin’s team. Such a factor made the FNPR Executive Council try to keep a distance from the Union’s previous position. Moreover, the opposition to Klochkov within FNPR took the chance to demand his resignation. Klochkov’s seat was soon replaced by the chairperson of the Moscow Federation, Mikhail Shmakov. Shmakov was formally elected on 28 October at the Second (Extraordinary) Congress of FNPR. Since then, the new leadership of FNPR has been committed to keeping the union in a stable position as well as emphasising the recognition of ‘social partnership’.

1.1.3 Chaotic reform: the aftermath of parliamentary conflict

After the 1993 conflict between the parliament and the president, Yeltsin’s government tried to stabilise the post-conflict environment, and senior officials expressed their expectation of achieving reconciliation with all social forces, including trade unions. The appeal was soon formalised with the presentation of the Social Accord Pact. After the resignation of Klochkov, FNPR was given the opportunity of engaging in ‘social partnership’ in exchange for its commitment to the Pact. The moves of both the government and the FNPR therefore opened another period of re-institutionalisation, in which the change of union status was more critical for its future development. Since the interactions of the involved parties over 1993-1994, FNPR re-ensured the monopoly status of its trade union legitimacy. On the other side, the harmony period between the alternative trade unions and the government had almost come to an end. The change of allocation of union seats on the Russian Tripartite Commission (RTK) proved such a tendency. By the same time, the worsening economic situation such as cash crisis and wage arrears started a new labour unrest at the enterprise level. Miners of Vorkuta went on strike action and even called on Yeltsin to resign. The alternative trade unions tried to regain their political weight by forming broader confederations - VKT (All-Russian Confederation of Labour) and KTR (Russian Confederation of Labour) - in 1995. The newly established confederations can only support very limited functioning organs and still relied heavily on a few union organisations, such as the unions of dockers (RPD), train operators (RPLBZh), and air-traffic controllers and pilots (FPAD and FPALS), as well as NPGR. The alternative trade unions are limited by their small membership and narrow sectoral interest from the expansion of their union organisations. In practice, the only function of such a coalition is for the alternative trade unions to construct a formally united representative body at the federal level.

The fall of living standards and the mounting wage arrears to some extent pushed the trade unions to show some reaction, whether the leaders were really willing to take serious actions or not. The FNPR resumed the All-Russian collective action on Oct 27 1994. The form of the collective action, nevertheless, was rather symbolic, for it only seemed to show that the union leaders perceived the worsening situation as a basis for the union’s campaign of looking for a vague solution for the national unrest without putting forward any concrete projects. The miners and workers in the budget sectors were the main force among the strike actions. After 1991, an increasing number of strike actions took place in the education sector, and there was an increasing tendency for more strikers to turn to the hunger strike as their method; the miners’ union organisations, interestingly, did not play a leading critical role in the strike movement until 1996.

Noteworthily, apart from the general bitterness of the Russian workers, there was another sort of strike action which was rather like internal conflict over the ownership of the enterprise. The application of privatisation at state-owned enterprise generated the fear of workers whose enterprises were facing the transfer of ownership. Interestingly, in many cases these individual strikes were exploited by the directors, who promoted strike action under the name of the labour collective in order to capture the control of ownership against external buyers.

The continuous fall of industrial production and real wages made a weak economic situation which, combined with large scale wage arrears, brought further political instability. By December 1997, one in four enterprises faced difficulties of fulfilling payments. The common outrage of the public and the anger of workers had burst over most sectors of the country’s economy. According to Katsva (2002), in 1997 alone, 16,639 of the total 17,007 recorded conflict cases were caused by wage arrears. The peak of strike or collective actions was in 1997-1998. The majority of strike actions took place in the sectors of energy, education and health care. The common dissatisfaction with the government was widely spread among Russian people so that for the first time the FNPR and alternative trade unions set up a coordinated action in 27 March 1997 when KTR and VKT gave support to the action day initiated by FNPR. In the summer of 1998, the miners, again, conducted their picket beside the government which lasted for four months, claiming they would fight until the government changed its economic policy, but the protest itself then ended dramatically. During this wave of social and labour unrest, the protesters and strikers usually called for Yeltsin and his government to step down and to change the course of economic reform, but no real change occurred in response to these demands, following the up-and-down of the appointed prime ministers. (In a way, the real change was that the old soviet apparatchiks came back to the political centre.) In most cases, the strike actions were against the state, not the enterprise owners. Most trade union leaders were standing together with the enterprise management to resist the hostile environment ‘caused’ by the central government. In some cases, it could also be a strike with the administration against the local authority (Ashwin and Clarke 2002).

Despite the progress in the Russian trade unions’ struggles for legitimacy, the events and experiences did not bring enough effective methods to support the life struggles of ordinary workers and union members. It was revealed (Katsva 1999; Borisov 2000) that the workers’ frustration arose at the lack of initiative of the official trade unions, thus radical actions emerged more and more often and became more common among the desperate workers whose wages had been delayed for several months. According to Katsva (ibid, p.162), among the workers who suffered there were the most desperate category of workers who had not received wages for 26 months, and that was the precondition for taking extreme actions when there was even such a case. Apart from the miners’ actions, there was also a hunger strike in Ivanovo city which lasted for 25 days (Anisimova 2004, p.65). Similar activities arose in various regions. Over 1998-1999, struggles took place by angry workers in Urals, Siberia and South Russia who blocked the railways to force the local administration or enterprise to resolve the difficulties they were facing. Such a special phenomenon was widely called the ‘rails war’, but after this the dynamic of similar actions started to fall.

These radical scenes of workers struggles were very impressive; however, most of these spontaneous actions normally ended up without giving serious grassroots dynamics to either the official or alternative trade unions. Instead of generating fresh challenges to the stabilised union-government relations, the strike committee or the temporary organisations themselves simply vanished. Take the remarkable event of workers’ resistance to the new company conditions at the Vyborg Pulp and Paper Mill (end of 1999-2000) as an example. For some observers like Maksimov (2001b), the event showed the great potential of Russian workers’ collective action, and the militant spirit spread so that even a local solidarity organisation was established. Nonetheless, the Vyborg event lasted for a couple of months but ended up with the government’s intervention with special forces, and the once militant labour collective became so passive that even the trade union committee almost dissolved.⁷ In general, the aftermath of this period is demonstrated by the fall of confidence in the effect of strike action in resolving labour problems. According to Anisimova’s study (2004), the poll of VTsIOM, the All-Russia Public Opinion Research Centre had shown clearly ‘The lack of positive result of strikes means low effectiveness and the impact can be seen by the fact that for Russian people strike action cannot make any positive result (from 5 % in 1989 to 33 % in 2001)’ (p.71).⁸

1.1.4 The new Labour Code: cooperation between the Government and FNPR

Since 1994, relations between the state, the FNPR organisations, and the alternative unions gradually achieved a specific kind of rigid balance (unbalance), in which FNPR’s lobbying capacity in the State Duma had a considerable impact on the power struggle with the alternative trade unions. One of the most notable events as evidence of this was the adoption of the new Labour Code in 2001. The Russian federal government’s initiative was to replace the former Soviet labour laws to meet the further needs of Russia’s ‘economic liberalisation’ (marketisation). Nevertheless, the original proposal was so unpopular even the FNPR leadership was in opposition to the government version. By conducting oppositional campaigns, the FNPR and the alternative trade unions promoted their alternative versions, in order to replace the government’s proposal. There were even coordinated actions against the government’s proposal joined by the FNPR and the alternative unions. The fact that even the pro-government ‘Unity’ parliamentary faction did not support the anti-worker draft of the new Labour Code, forced the federal government to find another solution. On December 21, 2000, the government of the Russian Federation was forced to withdraw its draft Labour Code from consideration in the State Duma. The former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kas’yanov took this decision to avoid the defeat of the government-proposed draft by a parliamentary vote. The vote, as the organisers believed, could be seen as the direct result of trade-union protest actions that struck Russia in December as well as the avalanche of indignant resolutions and telegrams expressing worldwide support for the opposition campaigns. Protests against the government’s draft were held in different regions around the country. For example, on the day of All-Russian protest action, the demonstrators in St Petersburg (up to 1,000 people) took to the streets of the city centre, and ended the rally at the building where President Putin’s regional representative in the North-West of Russia, Viktor Cherkesov, as well as the Federal Security Service General, is based. The protest campaign argued that ‘The government’s Labour Code is a gift to the bosses, the government’s Labour Code is a noose for workers!’

Dealing with the strong opposition, the federal government and the State Duma leadership agreed to form a Conciliation Commission to prepare a compromise version of the Labour Code, based on the government’s draft. The government, together with FNPR later on, intended to introduce a compromise bill to the State Duma in March-April 2001. The oppositional campaign of the alternative trade unions lost momentum after the adoption of the FNPR-supported Labour Code by 2001. The final adoption of the new Labour Code, which was closer to FNPR’s vision, struck an enormous blow against the alternative trade unions. When the new Labour Code went into effect in February 2002, many observers believed it spelled the end of the alternative trade unions (Klimova and Clément 2004). In effect, the new Labour Code stipulated that only one union could fully represent the employees of any given enterprise. According to Articles 29, 30, 31, 37 of the new Labour Code, only the trade union which organises the majority of workers at the enterprise can be authorised as the representative agent of the employees’ interests. An elected joint organ can become the representative organ only when there is no union organisation that can claim a majority in the enterprise. Consequently, the new Labour Code has granted most FNPR organisations the monopoly of workers’ representation under the current circumstance of the Russian trade union movement; in other words, since many alternative union organisations were established on professional / occupational principles, they can easily be ignored lawfully for their minor membership. The new Labour Code also narrows the category of union organisations in terms of their right to participate in the negotiation of a collective agreement. The right is now only given to the ‘primary organisation’ of a national trade union, so that those non-FNPR, independent trade union organisations have to seek a new ‘host’ in order not to be excluded from the possibility of sitting at the negotiation table. The qualification, nonetheless, does not automatically guarantee the negotiation seat. According to regulative conditions of the new Code, if the various primary organisations cannot compose a joint team within 5 days then the right will only go to the majority organisation. The proportional participation in the collective agreement therefore considerably depends on the will of the leadership of the union committee of the majority organisation (again, these are FNPR ones in most cases). The realities of such conditions on the ground show that there have been few cases where the consent or coordination between the FNPR and the alternative organisations has been achieved. On the contrary, primary organisations of FNPR trade unions are more likely to play the role of oppressing (or opposing) their counterpart from the alternative trade unions (Bizyukov 2005). In short, the authority and status of alternative trade unions have deliberately been weakened. While being a close ally of the Party of United Russia (Edinaya Rossiya), as Kargarlitsky (2006) commented, ‘the FNPR leaders certainly hailed the new Labour Code as an historic victory.’ Moreover, the whole event, by exploiting its political position to achieve the privileged status of representing labour’s seat in collective bargaining, has allowed the FNPR union organisations to enjoy a more institutionalised condition with a symbolic reform of their traditional activities.

The new Labour Code therefore represents a serious blow to the transition of Russian industrial relations. The impact, however, was not only on the rights of alternative labour organizations, but on any attempt to stand up for workers’ rights. The right to organise a strike, for example, has become much harder to exercise. The right for workers to leave their production duty was included in the new Code, but the conditions for a strike require very complex procedures for the initiators (see Article 399). Firstly, a majority of all employees have to vote for a strike, it has become impossible to organise a legal strike on a professional basis, which is the typical form of organisation of the alternative trade unions. Secondly, the union organisation has to successfully go through the procedure of a ‘collective labour dispute’ then to receive legal status for a legal strike to take place. Such conditions might not cause serious concern to the FNPR leadership, since in any case most of them are used to the duty of distributing social benefits for employees instead of fighting for the rights of their members. Over the four years since the new Labour Code was introduced, however, there have been a number of cases which reveal that damage has been done to the FNPR just as much as to the alternative unions. If a local FNPR official decides not to act as a corrupt opportunist, embezzling membership dues and running a business for the sale and lease of union buildings, and tries to do something else, he or she might also get hit with the full force of the repressive Labour Code. Therefore, infighting has increased within the FNPR, and unions have opted to leave. One widely noticed case was the trade union representing the employees of the Ford Motor Company plant in Leningrad Oblast. As they pulled off two successful strikes, labour activists at the plant discovered that their own union was more concerned about collecting dues than supporting their initiatives. By contrast, alternative unions were extremely supportive, despite their shortage of resources and political weight (Ilyin 2006).⁹ The trade union committee finally decided to leave FNPR and joined SOTsPROF and later VKT.

The impact of the enforcement of the new Labour Code on the Russian labour movement is obvious. The core group of alternative trade union activists held together under the assault, although many labour organizations went under. Their previous advantage, by which they could put the weak union capacity aside with the sponsorship of AFL-CIO funds and their legal status in the previous (Soviet) Labour Code, has all withered. One of the alternative union organizations, the All-Russia Confederation of Labour (VKT), has survived in a somewhat depleted form, along with the radical left-wing ‘Defence of Labour’ organization. Nevertheless, membership of alternative unions has fallen off dramatically. Union leaders left over from the 1990s have proved incapable of meeting the new challenges facing their members. Some have been removed from their posts, while others have lost the support of union activists. Certainly, we might have seen a new generation of leaders which has begun to emerge, including Pyotr Zolotaryov at AvtoVAZ and Alexei Etmanov at Ford. Together with the change at VKT in 2005, its member organisations elected a new leader, Boris Kravchenko. In face of the difficulties of union organisations’ survival and the fading of union impacts at enterprise level, the alternative trade union organisations have also started to try, or at least to look for, new forms of organisational work in order to keep the organisations alive. With little doubt, the situation shows the marginalisation faced by alternative trade union organisations in post-soviet Russia, with their weak representation among workers, and the activists somehow have to re-constitute the unions into another social organisation or association with limited resources (Bizyukov 2005).

1.1.5 The characteristics of the Russian trade union movement since 1989

The protest actions and the formation of new labour organisations since 1989 fairly revealed the fact that bitter feelings among Russian workers towards their living and working conditions in the post-soviet era did raise common dissatisfactions. Alongside the development of the conflicts and protest actions, the Russian trade unions to some extent carried specific characteristics under these circumstances. Despite the enormous membership basis, however, the basic problem facing the traditional Russian trade unions, as we have seen in previous sections, indicated the fact that they did not succeed in offering effective resistance to the massive job loss and failed to resist the sharp fall of workers’ living standards. Their goals were mostly defensive, focusing on not losing the enormous property and position inherited from soviet times. One who looks through the short history of post-soviet Russian labour relations might immediately get an impression of failure, but as Clarke et al. (1995, p.399) clarify, ‘The story of the workers’ movement in Russia can easily be interpreted as a story of failure. However, it is important to situate the story in its context’.

Certainly, one may argue that what Russian trade unions have faced is comparable to what the trade unions in the advanced capitalist societies have faced. The view reminds us of the nature of trade union which refers to the ‘dual character’ within trade unionism, in which the solidarity goal is practiced with the pursuit of immediate economic interest as the priority of its activity. One may refer to the fact that the division of labour has made schism a substantial part of the collective identity of organised labour and that has been a constant issue in Western society.¹⁰ Yet, since the Russian trade unions face a universal problem within the development of global trade union movement, the argument would suggest the matter is to work out a project out of the union’s dual principles.

Nonetheless, Russian labour certainly faces a different environment because there is so far little support for independent organised labour to act and constitute itself in at least a regional or professional presence. The alternative trade unions did not achieve a broader mutual support with institutional strength as did their Western counterparts. Another major difference is that, though there is division or schism among trade union positions in the West, it does not take the same form as in Russia where the traditional trade unions function as an arm of the administration of the enterprise, as can be seen in the train drivers’ case of this thesis and many other published case studies. Not to mention to a great extent those traditional unions remain the legacy of a collective identity in post-Soviet period which includes the role of directors and management. In general, there are two specific characteristics of the development described earlier which can be outlined as the concern of this research, which present specific questions facing the Russian trade union organisations, and these are addressed in the following sections.

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  Antagonistic development between ‘traditional’ and ‘alternative’ trade unions
  

As mentioned in the previous sections, many of the labour issues in post-soviet Russia revealed scenes of confrontational politics among Russian trade unions. The conflicts between FNPR and the alternative trade unions through their campaigns often appeared from the national level down to the individual issues of union duties. The two sides have criticised each other since 1988 over their position toward the regime, and engaged in struggles over union legitimacy and resources regarding the management of labour issues. Fundamentally, those conflicts reflected the demands over the enormous institutional resources as well as their different positions towards the administration. Though there has been cooperation or coordination between the FNPR and non-FNPR trade unions from time to time, the general relations between them are still deeply divided.¹¹

It is the case that serious divisions within trade union movements are quite common in many advanced countries. The confrontation between the two sides in Russia, however, was not between two commensurate forces. For the leaders of the alternative trade union organisations, their relatively easy access to the new ruling elites in the early 1990s did not last for long. Since the end of the 1993 conflict, the leaders of FNPR were offered new chances to recover their traditional ‘tie’ with the governing power. Yet, since then the priority strategy has been to take the chance to keep favour with Yeltsin’s and Putin’s Federal governments. The FNPR leadership and Yeltsin and his followers all learned the potential value and benefits for each side under the framework of a commitment to social partnership, and left the cries of the alternative unions aside. Under the new context, labour grievances nevertheless provided a strong basis for the development of trade union activities. The official trade unions, however, exploited that energy as a resource for their own re-institutionalisation in the transition period. As for the non-FNPR organisations, the consequence is apparent that even at the regional or national level, the position and the role of alternative trade unions have been greatly marginalised (especially local or primary union organisations are more likely to become primary victims). In addition, the political backgrounds have provided an even worse space: the available vacant space, the basis of its development, derives from the interest struggle among ruling elites. Later on, the leaders of the movement, person by person, started to enter into state institutions. It seems only the dominant FNPR organisations can take the lead on the workers’ side in the transformation of Russian labour relations. The events around the campaign over the new Labour Code provide a clear picture of the divided organisations.

Nevertheless, on the side of alternative trade union organisations, several unions (like the dockers’ and the pilots’ unions) still hold a very critical force in demonstrating a future perspective for the demands of organised labour. There have certainly been some cases of the formation of new trade unions on the basis of self-organisation. Notwithstanding the continuous emergence of a number of active and effective primary trade union organisations over the 90s and after, we still find that there are formidable barriers to the development of more active forms of trade unionism in the workplace. Alternative trade unions are rather active but keep a very small number of members. For them the worst problem is that they are unable to expand membership further. All trade unions have certainly been discredited and that becomes clearer in workers’ individualistic responses in tackling their problems. Even the alternative trade unions have failed to provide a serious channel for ordinary workers to represent their interests. Thus it is necessary to understand the critical facts behind the (immature) transformation of Russian trade unionism.

• 
  The lack of effective activities for trade unions
  

Alongside the moves of the Russian trade unions over the 90s, the development also reveals the conditions of weak interaction between members and union functionaries－ involving insubstantial union membership. Whether through lack of trust in their unions or the radicalisation of workers’ spontaneous actions since 1989, there has clearly been only slow progress in the interaction (integration) between the union’s competence and the workers’ difficult conditions (Hoffer 1997). Table 1.1 shows the low trust in trade unions among workers, as well as showing there is gap between such mistrust and the need for actions. The tendency of the decline of union density presents another familiar picture to us. Ironically, most Russian workers did not bother to go and require cancellation of their membership voluntarily. The insubstantial union membership retained in many Russian trade unions reveals the weak interaction between the trade unions and their members. This fact embraces two points. Firstly, the definition of membership in many FNPR organisations has not changed. The recognition of management’s membership within official trade union organisations and labour collectives may arguably cause an interruption within the identification process. Secondly, such ambiguous features do not attract much attention from ordinary workers. The primary FNPR union organisations could even just exist on official paper. Even the union leadership admitted that the great ignorance about the meaning of union membership by both union leaders and the workers reflects the further fact of mistrust between the two sides.

TABLE 1.1：VTsIom’s survey on workers’ trust in trade union

Time of Survey

Percentage of attitudes about trade union

Percentage ready to take part in protest actions when living standards worsen

Fully deserve trust

Do not fully deserve trust (partial trust)

Do not deserve any trust at all

All

Workers

Specialists

All

Workers

Specialists

All

Workers

Specialists

All

Workers

Specialists

June 1994 May 1995 March 1996 March 1997 March 1998 March 1999 March 2000

8 6 8 11 11 10 10

9 4 10 8 10 14 9

3 3 9 11 11 10 12

17 22 21 26 22 28 27

17 37 27 24 20 37 28

27 34 18 35 27 37 29

45 43 41 33 36 37 31

48 44 43 42 47 39 37

39 42 45 35 44 40 40

21 24 23 31 26 28 15

29 28 32 38 34 35 22

19 19 18 33 29 30 15

Source: (Gordon and Klopov 2000, p. 219)

Actually, on the ground the alienation between the two parts has been retained on many occasions as it was in soviet times. Trade unions, especially those belonging to FNPR, are formally big but highly bureaucratic and institutionalised. Whether in real practice or in the field of Russian labour studies, the FNPR trade unions are still widely noted as failing to genuinely function as organisations defending the members’ demands with their own strength (Sherbakov 2000). Despite their rhetorical claims of being independent and looking after their members’ interests, most leaders of union organisations are still used to keeping their role in the enterprise and follow their soviet-era predecessors in fulfilling their duty of distributing social benefits for the enterprise administration. As the popular day-to-day duty, many trade union functionaries and leaders still hold the belief that the most important and priority work for them is to offer every possible social benefit to their members.¹² On the other hand, we also understand most Russian workers see themselves as qualified recipients within the system of distribution of social benefits of the enterprise. The Russian mode is characterised by the incomplete achievements of soviet trade unions and their successors in the face of the call to defend the interests of their members. Such a characteristic is described by the Russian scholars Gordon and Klopov (2000, p.184) as ‘pseudo-trade unionism’, while taking the mode of Western trade unionism as the basic comparison. Comparing the similarity to the Japanese model, Clarke and Ashwin (2002) define the current character of Russian industrial relations: the collaborative relations between unions and management at enterprise level; the unions’ lack of involvement in controlling the shop floor, the tradition of enterprise paternalism, and the confinement of protest to symbolic ‘offensives’.

The weak interaction can be explained from both sides. On the one hand, union members pay little attention to their union leaders at every level; on the other hand, trade union leaders, likewise, have little confidence in members’ concerns and participation. For the union leaders, the crucial energy would not come from the independent activities of the members, at least until that really became widespread; the strength of their organisations is more likely to derive from upholding the traditional paternalist pattern in their workplace. As Clarke, Fairbrother and Borisov (Clarke et al. 1995) have investigated, the character of leadership within official trade unions is that it still contains their traditional role of associating with management at enterprise level. For example, the real purpose of those activities led by the reformed ROSUGLEPROF (Russian Independent Coal Miners’ Union) was to coordinate individual struggles as the instrument of the trade union bosses so that they could stand together with mine directors to put pressure on the government. Even though since 1994 the mine subsidy policy of the government has directly transferred to the mine administration, ROSUGLEPROF has still kept up the same route (Borisov 2000). Meanwhile, such an environment provided space for the bureaucratisation of the union structure (an undemocratic tendency). It is not difficult to see this in the case of the top level of trade union leaders, whose concern is to create their authority or keep their leadership within the existing institution. In addition, the frequent conflicts within the leadership of the main alternative trade unions, and frequent cases of corruption and scandals, show the problem of the leaders’ individual ambitions, although they continuously appeal to workers to look at their non-traditional but real defensive functions (see the study on alternative trade unions in Clarke et al. 1995). The limits of their narrow occupational base, associated with the conditions mentioned above, put the alternative trade unions in an awkward situation in trying to gain support among the majority of workers.

By acknowledging the fact that the Russian trade unions in the post-soviet period have not been able to produce a fundamental change / transformation of the current framework, various estimations and analytic aspects have been underlined. Among the analyses, some emphasise the way in which the substantial impact of ‘solitary individualism’ and the legacy of ‘alienated collectivism’ in the workplace have determined the moves of both the official, FNPR, trade unions and the alternative, free, trade unions. A number of observers (Mandel 2000; Katsva 2002; Maksimov 2004) therefore suggest that the incomplete reform of the union strategy, and especially the absence of a fundamental change among union personnel, is one of the most critical factors weakening the Russian trade unions in the transformation of labour relations in Russia. In their analyses, many cases or individuals involved in labour conflicts have demonstrated the possibility of changing the dimension of organised labour; or, on the other hand, at least have shown how and why a more progressive, active labour force has not appeared. The history of the trade union movement in Western societies and their institutional achievements are seen as the creation of an organised workforce which can play an important role for social peace or social changes, which make these observers believe that an immediate agent must emerge to articulate the response of social discontent. This research will move on to provide a further examination of such arguments. The shared analyses and the relevant factors will be further discussed in the next section.

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