Dilemma facing unions
The "old" unions are still, in the main, bureaucratic and monolithic organisations. But, although with limited impact, they stood out against
Yeltsin's coup d'etat. The response from the Yeltsinites was swift — they would, if necessary, completely neuter them if they dared to intervene
International Viewpoint #250 November 1993 for that matter, any confidence in their unions.
On the other hand, the "old" unions are in opposition to their governments.
This is not surprising, given the governinto political life again. The "new" unions, by and large, have preferred to keep a grip on Yeltsin's coat-tails and continue to back his political project. What then does the future hold for the Russian trade union ments' viciously anti-labour policies.
But in practice, the opposition is quite mild. There are two main, interrelated movement? DAVID MANDEL — Montreal, 18 October 1993
A N anecdote heard this
summer in Russia: An American and a Russian capitalist trade places. The Russian capitalist speeds up production, and his American workers go on strike. The American capitalist introduces obligatory ten hours overtime and fires twenty-five percent of the workforce. The Russian workers comply. A month later, he tells them they have to work twenty hours overtime and to hang twenty percent of the workforce. They agree but ask: "Do we have to buy the rope, or will the union allocate it?"
### Change
When I told people in Russia this summer that I was studying the trade unions they inevitably asked: "You mean we really have unions here?" And these were all union members.
In fact, change is occuring in the union movement but it is uneven and chaotic, and it may be too slow to save the only organised mass force in society with the potential to act as a counterweight to the neo-liberal forces of capitalist restoration (that is, the governments and the new capitalist class). The latter are still flying high and acting outside of any effective popular control.
Democratic, militant reform forces exist at virtually every level of the "old" trade union organisations, which still embrace about ninety percent of the workforce. But the reformers remain a relatively small minority among union leaders. For decades the "old" unions were subordinate parts of the political and economic management apparatuses. Their main tasks were to keep workers 10 in line and working and to "allocate" various goods (hence the question in the anecdote about the rope and social benefits. (Workers are only now realising just how significant the latter were.)
Most of the "old" unions today remain subordinate to the plant administration. This is not simply a matter of corruption. The cosy relationship has a certain objective basis in the fact that capitalist relations have only very partially been restored in the enterprises. For example, mass layoffs have not yet occurred, even though most plants, thanks to state economic policy, are working at a fraction of their capacity. Moreover, managers really are limited in their capacity to respond to workers demands, since the government, through its tax policy, strictly controls wages and it remains the only available source of funds for investment. In a collapsing economy, many unions - and workers — look to alliance with management to lobby government and thus save their factories and jobs.
### Unprepared
The problem is that the old "red directors" are very quickly becoming "white", and the danger is that the unions may find themselves woefully unprepared for the time when management completely turns on them and tries to destroy them, something that is already happening in privatised plants. Unless union reform accelerates, the unions will find they lack experienced activists capable of effectively fighting management. And even if these are found, they would have trouble mobilising rank-and-file workers who lack experience of independent struggle or, reasons for this: 1. The union leadership lacks its own vision of socio-economic reform, accepting the "necessity" of capitalism, while quixotically calling for a "socially oriented market". 2. In their majority, the rank-and-file union members are demoralised and do not believe in their own power to collectively shape the reforms.
### Exception
The most important "new" unions are small, strategically situated groups of workers in transport: longshoremen, airtraffic controllers, pilots, train drivers. The key exception is the Independent Union of Miners. But despite its broad influence among coalminers, it embraces only about a quarter of this group and it has been isolated from the rest of the labour movement. The other "new" unions are local organisations, most often only a tiny fraction of the workforce of the enterprise. They spend much of their time fighting the "old" union, though they can play a positive role in spurring the "old" union to adopt more militant positions and to reform itself.
In Russia, the "new" unions, in contrast to the "old", are strictly independent from management but, on the other hand, quite loyal to the government, especially to Yeltsin. This in no small part is due to government policy neutralising them through economic concessions, with the aim of splitting off the most militant sections from the rest of the labour movement.
Despite this overall gloomy picture, there are some bright spots, particularly in the Ukraine and Byelorussia. This summer, the governments of both republics violated general agreements they had signed with the unions by raising prices without prior consultation. In Byelorussia, the auto-workers' and radio-electronic workers' unions, two exceptional "old" unions in which
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• RUSSIA
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DOSSIER
International Viewpoint #250 November 1993 reform has gone far indeed, pushed the republican union federation into a protest campaign, including political demonstrations and strikes, to force the government to change economic policy or resign. Still in progress, the level of mobilisation has been significant.
In the Donbass, a key industrial region in eastern Ukraine, the coalminers initiated a strike movement that for the first time drew in the other industrial sectors. Despite the government's immediate, major pay concessions to the miners, the latter refused to be isolated again and held out for common political demands: regional autonomy and referendum of a confidence/non-confidence in the government and parliament.
The latter demand reflects the workers' rejection of the economic policies that have drastically reduced living standards and are destroying the economy.
Both efforts to exert control over their governments represent important steps forward for workers, raising the labour movement to new levels of organisation, solidarity and mobilisation. With the economy collapsing them, few around workers in the CIS today hold onto their earlier illusions about the promised benefits of the neo-liberal policies.
The concrete demands of both movements are anti-market. However, a major weakness remains the failure of the labour movement to put forth a viable workers' alternative.
Of the three major industrial republics — Russia, Ukraine and Belarus' — the labour movement is by far the weakest in the former. This was true even before Yeltsin's state coup of 21 September, that has drastically narrowed the political space for any effective opposition. In the other two republics, such a move by the state executives is inconceivable at present, not least because of the relative strength of the labour movements. Unlike Russia, in those two republics, the political opposition is not centred in the national parliaments, which are much more loyal to the state executives than was the case in Russia. Key segments of the labour movements there have played a more independent and active role in the opposition to the government than was the case in Russia before the coup. (In Russia, the most active segment of the labour movement, the miners has been bought off - for now, at least.) Besides that, the heads of the state executive branch in those republics lack even the minimal legitimacy of Yeltsin and they cannot count on the support of the armed forces.
The crushing of the parliamentary opposition in Russia was meant to open the way to a more vigorous application of IMF restructuring policy: this means an end to the remaining price controls, accelerated privatisation, the removal of subsidies to industry, mass bankruptcies and unemployment. This, in turn, requires a taming of the "old " trade unions, moderate as their opposition has been.
The federation of "old" trade unions
(FNPR) condemned Yeltsin's coup and called on workers actively to resist the violation of the constitution. (There was apparently no response.) The day after
Yeltsin decreed the dissolution of parliament, he removed the administration of social security from the unions, a move that will favour the exodus of workers from the unions. he closed down the national paper that was sponsored jointly by the union federation and the association of industrialists
(directors). This was the only paper with at least some labour coverage. A more timid version has since reappeared. Strong hints have also come from government circles that the unions will lose their automatic dues checkoff (something that certain regional administrators tried before but failed to do in the past) if they involve themselves in politics.
Added to the loss of the administration of social security, that measure would lead to the departure of the majority of union members. There is also a threat to confiscate the unions' significant property holdings.
Accordingly, once Yeltsin had won the contest with parliament, the president of the
FNPR was forced to resign at a federation plenum. This was a peace offering to Yeltsin.
FNPR unions have also foresworn politics, arguably the only effective method of struggle in a collapsing economy. In the short-term, the future of the Russian labour movement is bleak. And the
"new" unions, who supported Yeltsin's coup (surely a manifestation of the traditional Russian "good Tzar" syndrome)
will not be spared either. As the Chair of the "new" union of train engineers at a
Petersburg depot told us this summer:
"If the old unions are crushed, we won't survive either."
Given the tremendous suffering that
Yeltsin's policies are inflicting on the mass of the population, an upsurge in labour militancy is inevitable. The stronger the dictatorship, the more radical that upsurge will be when it comes. But at present it is impossible to predict when that will occur and what role the present unions will play in it.*
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