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Russia’s ‘New Wave’ of Organizing |
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| Lena, a postal worker in St. Petersburg, is one of a new wave of union members in Russia. |
Thanks to Tim Ryan and Lyuba Frenkel of the Solidarity Center for this diary of their trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, where there is a new wave of union organizing, especially among young workers.
April 11: The train pulls out of the Moscow railway station en route to St. Petersburg, just after midnight. We’re on this overnight train with Boris Kravchenko, president of the All Russia Confederation of Labor (VKT), the independent union federation. We’re planning on meeting and training young leaders of the new wave of union organizing in Russia.
Kravchenko told us:
This is the beginning of the movement. All of Russia was watching the Ford strike. All of St. Petersburg was mesmerized by this. People from other places, like Moscow and the Urals, were looking to this strike.
In February, union workers struck at the Ford Motor Co. plant in St. Petersburg and stopped management’s plan to “outsource” work and turn a significant part of the workforce into contract workers.
St. Petersburg is a hotbed of union activity, especially in multinational companies like Ford and Heineken. Workers also are organizing in central Russia, where striking workers at General Motors Corp. succeeded in replacing their manager.
But the action is really heating up in St. Petersburg. It’s a barometer of future union activity in Russia. More than that, this is a key moment for ordinary citizens who are trying to challenge a government increasingly intent on cracking down on freedom of speech, freedom of association and workers’ rights. Autoworkers, rubber workers, food workers, postal workers—they’re all on the move, and everyone agrees it’s a younger generation carrying the union torch forward.
The people of St. Petersburg take pride in having been at the forefront of labor, political and social activism in Russia for centuries. Although they face harassment, intimidation, physical threats, arrests and detention, they are not backing down.
April 12: CNN and the Russian government tout the new “Russian Revolution” as a wholesale capitalist bazaar of shining riches. But down in the trenches where the globalized workforce toils, the picture looks quite different. Fifteen union members and officers meet us at the VKT’s regional office. They work for Ford; Heineken; the government’s postal service, Nokian Tyres; and a major Russian tea sorting and packing facility, Golubye Porogi. Within the past six months, workers have begun recognition campaigns at several factories:
- Heineken workers recently won a strike. Tomorrow, they will start what they call an “Italian strike” (work-to-rule) aimed at raising wages and improving health and safety standards.
- The postal union is very small. It was organized March 9, but workers mounted a picket and demonstration April 9. The picket and demonstration grew when local folks who use the postal office spontaneously joined the union pickets. At least one of the members of another municipal union that supported the picket is now on trial on charges stemming from the demonstration.
- The Ford workers benefited from a solidarity campaign that included letters from the UAW, the Canadian autoworkers, Spanish autoworkers and German autoworkers. The German workers explicitly said they would not allow German production or cars shipped from Germany to fill the gaps left by the St. Petersburg plant during a strike.
According to Kravchenko:
Without this situation, it would be hard to talk about establishing free trade unions in other sectors. We have a good foundation. If we had five people like Alexei [the Ford union president] we could organize the whole country.
At the same time that this new wave of organizing is sweeping St. Petersburg, more foreign companies are investing in the city, making it even more of a hotbed for future organizing. Besides Ford and Heineken, companies that have either opened or plan to open plants in the coming months include Caterpillar; General Motors; Japan’s Toyota, Nissan and Suzuki; Canada’s Magna auto parts; France’s Peugeot; and South Korea’s Hyundai and Daewoo auto companies.
The AFL-CIO is helping the autoworkers and other unions in many ways. This week Amy Niehouse, an AFL-CIO senior organizer and trainer, is here to conduct a series of seminars for these new union activists. Many of them are committed and standing up to extreme pressure but need the tools to understand how to carry their organizing projects forward.
April 13: One of these brave new organizers is a young man named Maksim. Maksim is a driver in the government postal service, which employs about 20,000 workers in St. Petersburg. Maksim is a veteran of Russia’s brutal war in Chechnya, a breakaway province. A former officer, he’s a slim young man with short-cropped light-brown hair and eyes that alternate between weary and despondent.Speaking quietly, Maksim says:
Chechnya was a huge, life-changing experience. You look at the world differently now.
Like so many young Americans who are going to Iraq, he says he went to Chechnya first because it’s a “duty to my country”—but he also says that “a lot of people suffered for nothing.” He paused and says without our asking, “Did I do things I’m sorry for? Probably.…Every generation, in Russia, in America, has their experience.”
But when he talks about his union work and the unjust conditions he and his co-workers have to endure, his eyes begin to flash. “When we’re facing the problems we have now, my experience” [as an officer and a soldier facing hardship and tough moral choices] “helps a lot.” When he talks union with his co-workers, he says, “The mentality our people have is—the first thing they ask is, ‘Are you not scared to go against the State?’”
It’s clear that Maksim is ready to take it on. He took the initiative to help form the union on March 11 with just 18 people. They joined the union because the postal bureaucracy was cheating workers out of wages and forcing them to work in horrendous conditions—”18th century buildings that are falling apart,” Maxim says.
He’s right. Later, we accompany Maksim and Kravchenko on a visit to the postal facilities, which look worse than the slums of the North Bronx in the 1980s. Lead paint is peeling from all the walls and floors and ceilings are collapsing and threatening workers’ lives. Huge rats attack Maksim and his colleagues. Often there is no electricity, absolutely no heat at all in subzero temperatures all winter, and no electronic infrastructure that a post office in a city like St. Petersburg should take for granted.
Since those brave 18 workers signed up for a union a month ago, another 200 workers have joined the union. There are 10 other postal offices in the same condition as the one we saw and the workers there could be the core groups for future organizing.
Workers are paid between 8,000 and 9,000 rubles ($320–$360 a month), a decrease from what they were earning just a couple of months ago. Managers, on the other hand, receive 50,000 rubles ($2,000 a month) with 100 percent bonuses. “People are at the boiling point,” Maksim says. He is determined to continue organizing workers, despite having received physical threats. Other workers, too, have been physically threatened, intimidated by managers, transferred to lower-paying jobs and threatened with firing. But that has not dimmed their drive to organize.
Russia has seen this energy once before. When the Soviet Union unraveled in 1991, there was a burst of organizing of independent and democratic unions. But that only got so far. The initial stages of transition to capitalism still are marked by a kind of “mafia” or “gangster” capitalism that presents its own threats and challenges. Now, with this next wave of foreign investment from western and Asian companies, there are new opportunities. The new unions in St. Petersburg and elsewhere are trying to link up with some of the other democratic unions established in the 1990s.
Kravchenko speculates about the future:
Have we established one strong union to now? I’d say no. But have we built strategic ideas for these unions to expand outward? Yes.
It’s clear that if international solidarity and support is going to make a difference for the workers of St. Petersburg, the time to act is now.
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