Interview with Soviet miners leader they needed my help in forming the trade union at the mine. They said that they would manage by themselves and that I should return in a month. When I returned they had registered the union and received
THE recent Soviet miners' strike has been presented in much of the western media as simply an aspect of Boris Yeltsin's struggle with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Aleksandr Sergeev is a member of the Interregional
Co-ordinating Council of Strike Committees and vice-chair of the Executive Bureau (EB) of the Independent Trade Union of
Miners (ITM). He is also a member of the strike committee of the city of Mezhdurechensk in the Kuzbass. He spoke to David
Seppo in Moscow on May 4, 1991, about the real background to the strike and how miners are organizing in the Soviet
Union.
F I recall correctly, Mezhdurechensk is where the strike began in July 1989. What is its social composition?
It is a mining town of about 100,000 people. There are five mines as well as a factory that makes pre-fabricated units for construction. About 50,000 people are employed in the mines and the factory.
Besides children, pensioners and housewives, some 5,000 work in trade. The trade sector here is run by the mafia, just as in Moscow.
We are trying to improve the situation, but in conditions of generalized shortage, it is impossible to completely end the abuses.
• What is the composition of your city soviet? Are the candidates of the strike committees in the majority?
No. About 30% are workers' representatives. Of this 30% some are workers and some intellectuals. It is not easy for workers to deal with budgetary and economic questions. The Communists predominate. People do not believe that the city soviet can resolve their problems. • How would you rate the general level of consciousness and abilities of the workers?
Compared to the general level of all employees (toilers) in the USSR, it is rather high. Sociological studies of the workers have shown that they are rather independent people, who can do things with their own hands. Of course, the economic crisis has a depressing influence, but the desire for action is there in most. • Tell me what has been happening since the Second Congress of Min-
Main Soviet coalfields an official stamp, but the union had only a few members. They simply did not know how to go about it. I explained this to them. And today, in a collective of 1,500 we have about 300 members.
The small number is not so important. That fact is that, for many years, Soviet trade unions' main activity was dispensgoods that are in short supply. And so people are wary of leaving those trade unions. Only those who understand the tasks of trade unions are ready to leave. • Can one be a member of both unions?
In principle, yes. Our constitution allows it. But the other trade union forces people to choose. People say they are afraid of losing their sick pay. We explain that sick pay, trips to sanatoria and so on are not paid by the union but by state insurance and the law says that any worker has a right to these benefits, regardless of whether the enterprise made its payments to the fund or whether an individual is a member of the trade union.
And when the workers leave the state union they really do continue to get these benefits. The same with the sale of consumer goods within the enterprise. After all, it is the entire collective that earned them, and they should be distributed equally. • How did the present strike begin?
The Second Congress of Miners in October 1990 decided to launch a campaign for a general collective agreement in the coal sector. It elected an EB and assigned it three tasks: organize union locals, conclude a general collective agreement and organize miners' congresses. We began to organize locals. We now have more than 50,000 members in the entire Soviet Union. This is a small number, but these are committed people.
Vorkuta
USSR
Donbass
Cheremkhova
Karaganda
CHINA
Kuzbass
Bureya
Sakhalin
MONGOLIA
We worked out our demands and wrote up a draft collective agreement for the sector. We presented it on November 20 and received a negative reply a month later. In the case of a negative reply, the law proposes a conciliation commission.
Again papers. The EB proposed conciliation, but the authorities ignored this. We sent Ryzhkov, Gorbachev and Lukyanov
[Chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet] a warning that we were considering a 23 general strike.
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
is rational"
USSR missed your thousand tonne norm by two tonnes. Then you would get, say, 300 rubles. However, if you surpassed the norm, you would get 600 rubles. But your output does not depend mainly on your work. The geological conditions could be delivered, or the combine broken down. It turns out you worked practically for free. So we demanded to be paid by the tonne, independently of the plan. We won this, but they still managed to get around it: yes, up to a certain level, we'll pay a fixed rate by the tonne, but then, depending on how vigilant the miners were, the authorities sneaked in sliding scales and bonuses
So we began to ask ourselves: how are these basic wage rates set at the centre? Why is it two rubles an hour and not six? By that time the first Congress of Miners was approaching and we decided to work worked out the principles, and the EB continued to work on it. According to these principles, a miner's wage should have four constituent parts. First of all, a basic wage. This should be the value of the consumer basket of an average person, regardless of stoppages that are not the worker's fault. This is thus a guaranteed minimum. Secondly a guaranteed payment for harmful working conditions: above-normal concentrations of dust, methane, nightwork, heat over 26 degrees and so on. A third part is payment for time going to and from work, washing and so on. At least a part of this should be compensated. The time spent at production is six hours, but in fact a person might spend ten hours or more in all. This is his personal time. Only the fourth element should be about quality of output. We haven't worked this out fully.
As we understand it, this is the practise among miners in the West, that is, a guaranteed minimum for a decent life and to compensate for harmful working conditions. At present, the fact that our miners' wages depend on how much they produce forces them to violate safety norms, to work in conditions that exceed the norms for dust by 2000 times. The consequences are silicosis, trauma; a worker does not value his life. The state trade unions have the right to shut down the enterprise if conditions exceed safety norms. But it will not do this because it knows that workers have to earn a living.
Of course, the government will oppose our demands because they raise the issue of the organization of production. They will say: how can we pay what the miner has not produced? We answer that that is your responsibility, director, chief engineer, department head and minister and prime minister.
I am above all a person. I pay taxes to the state, I elected a deputy and appointed you to your post. You are supposed to be
26 mgma fied specialist at your post and I at
International Viewpoint #207 • May 27, 1991
• Compensation for harmful conditions has been criticized as encouraging workers to tolerate and even seek to work in such conditions, at the same time as freeing management from pressure to remove these conditions.
Our position is to make management pay for harmful conditions. For example, according to norms, no person should lift more than 50 kilos. But as an electrician in the mines I carried beams and metal that weighed 60 or 70 kilos. So our idea is that wage supplements for harmful conditions will make it unprofitable for management to ignore these conditions.
We are in practise going over the same route that your trade unions traversed years ago. So that when we ask what kind of help we need from the West, we answer that we don't primarily want financial and material help, although, of course, that is important — we need your experience, your methods, your knowledge of how to conduct negotiations, so that we won't have to invent all this anew. That is why we want to establish contact with Wester miners, to get their experience and learn their history. Of course, we are proud of what we have done ourselves. I was talking to my acquaintance in the state trade union and I told him: you have to admit that there isn't a single state union that ever proposed the principles we have worked out. And that is because they were worked out by people who had the desire to change things. They answer: well, come over and be a leader in our union. My answer to this is: why should I join you when you haven't come to these ideas yourselves. Why should we impose them from above? It would be the same system as before: a kind lord appears, he looks things over and gives the nod. Let's rather proceed from below, by ourselves, to propagate our idea. • How does the miners' movement relate to the different political cur-
I'll try to do this briefly, though it might not be so clear because it really would require a lot of time to explain. Our trade union adheres to a purely trade unionist principle, that is: that for now at least, the trade union should not support any political party. But at present we have to look at the situation.
In addition, there are those strike committees that have not yet transformed themselves into trade unions and which adhere more or less to the orientation of the democrats, in the Soviet sense of the
[ie. liberals] though maybe this might not mean the same thing as in the
In Russia, this is the Democratic Russia movement. This is especially true in the Kuzbass. Golikov for example, the chairman of the Council of Strike Committees of the Kuzbass, is on Yeltsin's brains
• Are the political positions of these strike committees supported by the rank-and-file?
I would say so, for the most part. After all, the idea of sovereignty is attractive. The centre has ripped us off for a long time, and the idea is correct. I also, incidentally, am a a patriot of Russia; I want there to be a Russian republic that is sovereign, but within the Union. And let them divide up their powers.
To put it briefly - perhaps abstractly and a bit crudely — a struggle is occurring today between the Communist boyars [aristocrats] and the new bourgeoisie that used to serve the boyars but has grown tired of that. They now have the desire to rise to the top themselves. The bourgeoisie are enterprising people, whose capital Worked for this boyars for along lime, sey is their knowledge. They • You are talking about the intelli-
Yes, the intelligentsia, economists and the like. So to put it rather figuratively, there is this struggle taking place between the boyars and the new bourgeoisie, whose capital, for now, is knowledge. For us, workers and the workers' movement, it makes more sense now to support this bourgeoisie, because for 70 years the Communists' belongs to everyone and to me, thing is the Kolkhoz's", has shown its unsoundness — in general, although in principle some degree of centralization and planning are necessary. It is a question of deciding what is rational.
The new bourgeoisie are proposing a system that gives the worker a chance to sell his labour power according to the amount agreed. That is, you too are a person, and we give everyone a chance — though this is really open to debate, here as well as in the West. In any case, they are proposing a concept of a normal socie ty in which everyone will have a chance - though I repeat, the validity of this claim is far from obvious. So while this struggle is going on, we naturally support the new bourgeoisie. Because the foggy orthodox Communist idea, radiant future, is not based on concrete reality and concrete forces.
But we must never forget that when the new bourgeoisie comes to power - that is an inevitable process, for either they will share power with the boyars and live with them in peaceful coexistence or they will come to power on their own - those whose capital is knowledge will want to transform this into material capital.
In any case, when the new bourgeoisie tries to turn its knowledge into capital they will want to exploit us, that is part of their system. So while supporting at present the movement of democrats -though we know that they are really a orientation if judged from the point of
But then, after all, Yeltsin is a politician. • Do you think that Yeltsin's prom-
Today, the papers published Yeltsin's decree transferring the mines to the jurisdiction of the Russian Republic. Those mines that want to will receive their independence and pay only taxes. The others will be subordinated to the Russian Committee for Fuel and Energy.
I consider that this measure proposed by Yeltsin is populist. It might well turn out that he will take into Russian jurisdiction only the profitable mines and leave the others. We have to see. But the threat of closures is real in Russia too, including
In general, I am categorically opposed to such blanket recipes. In the 1930s there was mass collectivization; now they want to conduct mass privatization, at full speed and without any economic analyses or studies of the situation in the coal industry as a whole. We need time to study these questions. They are holding out to miners the prospect of becoming owners and masters. But what will happen after that, nobody knows.
I told the representatives of the Raspadskaya mine [one of the largest in Russia]: two and a half years ago they offered arrangement to persuade you to abandon the strike. Two years later, in 1991, you struck again, and they let you become a joint stock company in order to end the strike. What will you strike for the next time? You haven't yet even understood the first stage and you are already jumping into another. They are throwing you bones. These are pure slogans without any economic basis, like
Not everyone agrees with me, of course. • And what is the view among the rank-and-file?
There too, opinions are divided. A person who has spent six hours at physical labour and then has to think about how to get food, is naturally not worried about such things. They tell him: here's your chance to become owner; until now you have been working without being owner. And he thinks to himself: hey, maybe that's the truth. Who the hell knows?
We are going through a process of selfeducation. We don't trust any economists. They offer different and contradictory analyses depending on who is paying them. We take one point of view, another, try to compare them, and then draw our own conclusions. But in making the comparison, we start from the principles of the trade union: it was created to defend employment, wages, and health and safe-
None of the programmes, neither that of Pavlov nor of Silaev [prime minister of the Russian Republic] take these lems into consideration. They don't even mention them. In principle, that is correct, since that's what a government exists for: in order to get out of the crisis, you have to cut off the ends, and do anything that will keep the ship afloat. But we can't adopt that point of view.
Our small union has forced the state to should exist for all sectors, although it is the state unions who will conclude the agreements, and their leads them to be conciliatory. Until the 1930s Soviet trade unions used to conclude such agreements, but then that right was taken away. Until about 1930, the function of determining the value of labour belonged to the Central Council of Trade Unions, but it was taken over by the State Commission on Labour. • Is there anything in your collective agreement about enterprise management? Who will hire the director?
If you analyze the agreement, you will see that it will radically change relations
USSR in the entire country. Before, in our country, it was production for production's sake. Now, the basic principle would be that everything produced by people will be produced for themselves. And price number one should be the value of a person's skills, knowledge, the value of his labour power. For that to be true, the labour legislation has to be changed, as well as the system of social insurance and the laws regarding self-management.
There is nothing concrete in the draft agreement about who will manage. It says to the state: you own 90% of the property (the rest being private plots, cooperatives and non-state enterprises), you buy our labour power and you have many obligations towards us. Let's define our respective pow-
First of all you are obliged to provide us with work and to pay us so that we won't starve. At present, we are not paid for stoppages that are not our fault. We are on piece work. We are demanding to be paid by the hour. Our concept is that 70% of the wage should be hourly and 30% piece-rate.
So, the state is the owner, we are the labour force. The state should provide us with work-guaranteed employment, and decent socio-economic conditions. But at the same time, we do not deny the collective its right to take over the enterprise as its property. But even if it does this, wages and other conditions cannot be below those fixed in the collective agreement. That is, the agreement must hold for the salaried workers regardless of the form of property, whether it be joint-stock, private, state or collective. It must be recog nized that a person works in order to feed his family and to live decently. He does not go to work to feed the neighbour's family or to realize some lofty ideas. The worker, the basic producer of all the value that exists on earth, and his needs, must be the cornerstone. • Can you expand on the proposed form of wages?
This conception was developed over a long period. I worked on this when I was still chairman of my mine's trade-union committee. After the July 1989 strike I was elected chairman of the state trade union committee. In the mine, we tried to understand this question. It turns out that there is a basic pay rate that is set by the State Commission on Labour for the minister. These basic rates are included in the cost and price of coal, which are also set by the state. We began to think about how to organize things so that a minimum wage could be guaranteed. The first step was our demand in the 1989 strike that the state pay a hard price for each tonne of coal.
Before that, you were paid a basic wage; after that came the bonus; that depended 25 on you fulfilling your norm. Say that you May 27, 1991 • #207 International Viewpoint
missed your thousand tonne norm by two tonnes. Then you would get, say, 300 rubles. However, if you surpassed the norm, you would get 600 rubles. But your output does not depend mainly on your work. The geological conditions could be delivered, or the combine broken down. It turns out you worked practically for free. So we demanded to be paid by the tonne, independently of the plan. We won this, but they still managed to get around it: yes, up to a certain level, we'll pay a fixed rate by the tonne, but then, depending on how vigilant the miners were, the authorities sneaked in sliding scales and bonuses
So we began to ask ourselves: how are these basic wage rates set at the centre? Why is it two rubles an hour and not six? By that time the first Congress of Miners was approaching and we decided to work concept.The worked out the principles, and the EB continued to work on it. According to these principles, a miner's wage should have four constituent parts. First of all, a basic wage. This should be the value of the consumer basket of an average person, regardless of stoppages that are not the worker's fault. This is thus a guaranteed minimum. Secondly a guaranteed payment for harmful working conditions: above-normal concentrations of dust, methane, nightwork, heat over 26 degrees and so on. A third part is payment for time going to and from work, washing and so on. At least a part of this should be compensated. The time spent at production is six hours, but in fact a person might spend ten hours or more in all. This is his per-
Only the fourth element should be about quality of output. We haven't worked this out fully.
As we understand it, this is the practise among miners in the West, that is, a guaranteed minimum for a decent life and to compensate for harmful working conditions. At present, the fact that our miners' wages depend on how much they produce forces them to violate safety norms, to work in conditions that exceed the norms for dust by 2000 times. The consequences are silicosis, trauma; a worker does not value his life. The state trade unions have the right to shut down the enterprise if conditions exceed safety norms. will not do this because it knows that workers have to earn a living.
Of course, the government will oppose our demands because they raise the issue of the organization of production. They Will say: how can we pay what the miner has not produced? We answer that that is your responsibility, director, chief engineer, department head and minister and prime minister.
I am above all a person. I pay taxes to the state, I elected a deputy and appointed you to your post. You are supposed to be • a qualified specialist at your post and I at International Viewpoint #207 • May 27, 1991
• Compensation for harmful conditions has been criticized as encouraging workers to tolerate and even seek to work in such conditions, at the same time as freeing management from pressure to remove these
Our position is to make management pay for harmful conditions. For example, according to norms, no person should lift more than 50 kilos. But as an electrician in the mines I carried beams and metal that weighed 60 or 70 kilos. So our idea is that wage supplements for harmful conditions will make it unprofitable for management to ignore these conditions.
We are in practise going over the same route that your trade unions traversed years ago. So that when we ask what kind of help we need from the West, we answer that we don't primarily want financial and material help, although, of course, that is important — we need your experience, your methods, your knowledge of how to conduct negotiations, so that we won't have to invent all this anew. That is why we want to establish contact with Western miners, to get their experience and learn their history. Of course, we are proud of what we have done ourselves. I was talking to my acquaintance in the state trade union and I told him: you have to admit that there isn't a single state union that ever proposed the principles we have worked out. And that is because they were worked out by people who had the desire to change things. They answer: well, come over and be a leader in our union. My answer to this is: why should I join you when you haven't come to these ideas yourselves. Why should we impose them from above? It would be the same system as before: a kind lord appears, he looks things over and gives the nod. Let's rather proceed from below, by ourselves, to propagate our idea. • How does the miners' movement relate to the different political cur-
I'll try to do this briefly, though it might not be so clear because it really would require a lot of time to explain. Our trade union adheres to a purely trade unionist principle, that is: that for now at least, the trade union should not support any political party. But at present we have to look
In addition, there are those strike committees that have not yet transformed themselves into trade unions and which adhere more or less to the orientation of the democrats, in the Soviet sense of the word [i.e. liberals] though maybe this might not mean the same thing as in the
In Russia, this is the Democratic Russia movement. This is especially true in the Kuzbass. Golikov for example, the chairman of the Council of Strike Committees of the Kuzbass, is on Yeltsin's brains
• Are the political positions of these strike committees supported by the rank-and-file?
I would say so, for the most part. After all, the idea of sovereignty is attractive. The centre has ripped us off for a long time, and the idea is correct. I also, incidentally, am a a patriot of Russia; I want there to be a Russian republic that is sovereign, but within the Union. And let them divide up their powers.
To put it briefly - perhaps abstractly and a bit crudely — a struggle is occurring today between the Communist boyars [aristocrats] and the new bourgeoisie that used to serve the boyars but has grown tired of that. They now have the desire to rise to the top themselves. The bourgeoisie are enterprising people, whose capital at present is their knowledge. They worked for the boyars for a long time, servicing their ideology. • You are talking about the intelli-
Yes, the intelligentsia, economists and the like. So to put it rather figuratively, there is this struggle taking place between the boyars and the new bourgeoisie, whose capital, for now, is knowledge. For us, workers and the workers' movement, it makes more sense now to support this bourgeoisie, because for 70 years Communists' belongs to everyone and to me, "everything is the Kolkhoz's", has shown its unsoundness — in general, although in principle some degree of centralization and planning are necessary. It is a question of deciding what is rational.
The new bourgeoisie are proposing a system that gives the worker a chance to sell his labour power according to the amount agreed. That is, you too are a person, and we give everyone a chance — though this is really open to debate, here as well as in the West. In any case, they are proposing a concept of a normal society in which everyone will have a chance - though I repeat, the validity of this claim is far from obvious. So while this struggle is going on, we naturally support the new bourgeoisie. Because the foggy orthodox Communist idea, that of the radiant future, is not based on concrete reality and concrete forces.
But we must never forget that when the new bourgeoisie comes to power - that is an inevitable process, for either they will share power with the boyars and live with them in peaceful coexistence or they will come to power on their own - those whose capital is knowledge will want to transform this into material capital.
In any case, when the new bourgeoisie tries to turn its knowledge into capital they will want to exploit us, that is part of their system. So while supporting at present the movement of democrats -though we know that they are really a
La social-democratic orientation if judged from the point of
view of world experience — we must never forget that sooner or later we will clash with them, and are already clashing over a number of issues. Therefore, we are creating a trade union that at first deals with purely union problems and stays out of politics. • Do you foresee the need for a workers' party?
I can't predict what the future holds. But I can give you my personal opinion. In order for a person to be able to define his political position, he has to have reached a certain level of knowledge as well as have acquired the desire to do so. For now, we director will reply: why ask me? It is your enterprise. You are responsible for it.
Look at the process of establishing republican sovereignty at enterprise level. In principle it is a good process. But it has its negative sides. The republics say to their workers: we are all brothers; the centre is robbing us
Let's take over all the enterprises and we will be rich. And each one says it is the other who is to blame. They want to be free from the structures above them but to preserve their own structures to
USSR / EUROPE dominate those below. And so it goes all the way down the line.
They want to exploit our ignorance.
Capital is being accumulated, and it will flow to those who have economic knowledge.
• Do you think the workers, when they fully realize what is happening, will revolt against this?
I don't at all deny this. It's at that point that the possibility of a party will become real.*
Europe - the still have to raise the workers up to that level. The majority of people today are preoccupied with the question of what to concrete utopia eat and drink. So we have to interest them in these other things. We have to allow the worker to feel that he is a person. And when he feels this, when he receives all that he has earned, has extra money, time to read books, his horizon will broaden.
then he will be able to define himself.
THE unification of Germany and the Gulf war have pushed the