Yeltsin's sharp populist attacks against bureaucratic privileges please the workers.
The fact that he is beginning to raise the question of a multi-party system indicates all the explosive potential of the political reforms underway.
However, for the moment, Yeltsin personifies a line "for the workers" and not a perspective of self-organization. However, the latter represents the only way of proceeding to resolve this crisis along lines leading toward the emancipation of all, toward socialism. *
Massive
rise in
Soviet
labor
conflicts
FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, the USSR has been experiencing the greatest rise in labor conflicts in a quarter of a century. The source of the discontent is the wage reform, a deepgoing restructuring of relations within the enterprises aimed at tightening the link between remuneration and the work done, which had become too loose under Brezhnev.
DAVID SEPPO
N FACT, in the "command system," conflicts between workers and management were attenuated by consideracollusion to hide reserves of productivity from the higher authorities that decided on production targets for the enterprises. The management did its best to give the workers stable and relatively rising wages (although greatly eroded by inflation). It also tolerated certain infractions of discipline. For their part, the workers helped management fulfill the objectives of the plan by tolerating its failure to respect the labor legislation and bad working conditions.
The reform is aimed at linking the workers' incomes to the enterprises' performance in a market context. The objective is to create a common interest between the management and the workers to find and utilize reserves of productivity in order to increase the economic efficiency of individuals and enterprises, and to produce quality goods corresponding to the interests of the society.
The self-management measures included in the reform flow logically from the latter goal. According to Gorbachev, the workers
USSR should be able to influence the choice of managers and monitor their activity, because their welfare is going to depend on the management's capacities. This is a necessary political precondition for getting workers to accept the other aspects of the reform. But there is also an economic logic here. The aim of self-management is to overcome the workers' alienation, to cultivate a spirit of joint responsibility for the fate of the enterprise. Election of managers and workers' councils
The reform envisages two management measures — election of managers and election of workers' councils that would share both making decisions and monitoring their execution. What is more, a campaign is being waged in the trade-union press for democratization of the unions. What does this amount to practice?
The director of the Communist Party's Institute of Social Sciences has admitted that "workers' participation in management remains a wish, a goal rather than a reality." 1 According to the polls, the workers' councils have had little impact on the life of the enterprises.
As for the unions, they remain as before hand in glove with the management. A poll conducted by the Central Council of Trade
Unions found that no more than one or two workers out of a hundred took their wage grievances to the unions.?
Instead of creating a new solidarity between the workers and the managers to improve the performance of the enterprises, the reform has widened the gulf between the workers and the management, reinforced the attitude of "us against them,"
and increased the number of labor conflicts.
It has undermined the old bases of collusion and corruption, without however creating economically sound bases of
This undoubtedly explains the poor results of appeals for democratization of the unions. In conditions in which conflicts are intensifying, neither the political leadership nor, of course, the plant managements, see any real interest in facilitating independent organization by the workers. That could not only undermine the reform (as it is presently conceived) but also threaten political stability.
What are the various sources of conflict?
An important one is the arbitrary and illegal application of the wage reform. Violating the law, without consulting the workers, the managers are announcing a general demotion to lower skill grades. This is an easy way to comply formally with the reform, which requires an increase in base wages, accompanied by a tightening of norms and a careful verification of the workers' skills.
1. ZH. Toshchenko, "Soznanie, nastroenie, deistvie,"
Agitator 12, 1988, p.11.
LE 8, rey, Sotsialaya sfera i profoyazy" Trud, 13
July 8, 1988. April 3, 1989 • #159 International Viewpoint
USSR
The result is a speed-up without compensation in higher wages. In the absence of unions to defend them, the workers turn to the papers to complain, to higher political bodies and, more and more frequently, have been resorting to strikes. In the published reports, the higher authorities intervene to put things right. It is hard to know if this happens often.
But the problem goes much further than the arbitrariness of the managements. The reform aims to put an end to the practice of assigning workers higher grades than they. merit. This was a means commonly used by the enterprises to attract workers in the conditions of labor shortage created by the "command" systems.
Making workers pay for bureaucracy's errors
In a more general way, the reform asks the workers to accept a speed-up or a reduction in bonuses in order to end the "injustices of the past" and restore the principle of "social justice"— "to all according to their work" (a formula open to different interpretations, depending on the interests
From the standpoint of the workers, the real injustice is making them pay for the practices engendered by a system of economic management that was introduced and maintained not in the interests of the workers, but of the bureaucracy. However, the regime is not asking those really responsible for the "injustices of the past" to make sacrifices. It is talking about a major reduction of administrative personnel. But that would barely touch the higher ranks. At the same time, the material privileges of the bureaucrats, deeply hated by the masses, would remain largely intact.
Therefore, the workers are reacting against what they consider a unilateral abrogation of an understanding that has long governed relations within the plants by abandoning their former conciliatory attitude toward the failings of the management and its violations of labor law. At the same time, the political liberalization and the official talk about political democracy are creating a new feeling of what is possible in showdowns with management.
Conditions and practices that were tolerated, with ups and downs, in the past are now becoming causes of open conflicts.
This is the case in particular of overtime work resulting from the system's incapacity to assure a normal tempo of production. "Slack periods" at the beginning of the month or the quarter are followed by speed-ups at the end of these periods. This requires long hours of overtime during the week and over weekends. But even when this overtime is paid at a higher rate, this does not always compensate for the loss of wages owing to "slack periods," nor the ravages caused to the personal lives of the workers. If these mainly illegal practices • were more or less tolerated under the old International Viewpoint #160 • April 3, 1989 system, they are less so today. The workers are demanding that the managers put production "in order."
As for self-management, this aspect of the reform is running up against the resistance of the factory directors. You can understand their attitude, because the old system of centralized management still remains in place, with all the external constraints and pressures on the enterprises that this involves. Giving the workers a real voice would overly complicate the lives of the managers, depriving them of the flexibility necessary to fulfill the objectives of the plan in conditions of irregular supply of
However, in the rare cases in which the management has encouraged workers' participation, the workers have often been reluctant to take the bait. In conditions in which the ministries are still largely determining the fate of the enterprises, self-management is perceived designed to get the workers to take respon sibility for a situation that they cannot
Thus, in those rare enterprises in which self-management is functioning, a new type of conflict is arising — one between the workers and the managers against the ministries over the targets of the plan and attempts to link weak enterprises to effiThe market conflicts with self-management
There are in fact workers in the most skilled layer in the factories who would be in a good position in the context of a market reform and who consider autonomy of the plants in a market context as a good solution. But the example of Yugoslavia has shown this to be only a blind alley.
In the last analysis, the market conflicts with self-management, because when the workers have power in the plants they use it to guarantee their jobs and wages. In other words, with self-management you cannot have either a labor or a capital market.
In reality, most of the workers distrust the market reform as presently conceived by the regime. They fear that this reform will undermine the existing social guarantees. According to a Moscow Trade-Union Institute specialist: "The new accounting system for enterprises and the new labor legislation pose in a more urgent way the problem of social protection for individuals. Will not the humanism of socialist principles be sacrificed on the altar of economic gain?" 3
The problem is not rejection of the market as such. The question is whether the market will impose its criteria of rationality on the society or whether the society will subordinate the market mechanism to the type of development that it collectively
In breaking the ties of collusion, the wage reform has in a way liberated working-class consciousness. For the moment, the conflicts remain local. But there are already attempts at independent working-class organization at a city level.
Workers' groups and unions being formed
In the city of Yaroslavl, a "workers' group" made up of enterprise delegates has joined the local People's Front (an independent movement formed as a result of a mass rally on June 8, 1988, called to protest against the election to the Nineteenth Party Conference of a detested first secretary of the party provincial committee).
The active force in this "workers' group" is the workers' club in the huge motor factory that experienced a week-long strike at the end of 1987 against an attempt by the management to require workers to work 15 Saturdays in 1988. Another "workers' group" has been formed in the city of Andropov.4
Toward the end of 1988, in Lithuania, 300 delegates from 70 enterprises founded the Workers' Union of Kaunas, whose aim was to "fight for restructuring the union committees, for a corresponding restructuring of the plant newspapers and for defense of the rights of workers against the arbitrariness of the managements." Other unions are forming in Vilnius and Klaipeda, and also in Lithuania.
An unpopular measure coming from the center that directly affects the workers' situation, like the price reform, could provide the spark for a large-scale working-class mobilization. Among the population, opposition to such a reform is very strong. Already mass anger is rising in response to a rate of inflation that is eroding wages and to a tendency on the part of the enterprises to stop production of the cheapest consu-
Far from meaning the end of perestroika, such a mass mobilization is a prerequisite for a real revolutionary restructuring in the USSR, which is the only kind that would have a chance of succeeding. *
OPTAMETAL
3. V. Vishnyakov, "Prosit' ili trebovat"," Trud, October 4. A. Mineev, Moskovskie Novosti, January 15, 1988, 5: N. Belyaeva, "Nationalnyi li narodhyi?," Moskowskie Novosti, December 25, 1988, p.10.
anti-imperialist front