Some 350 workers, who have not been paid since March, are staging a sit-in protest at a nuclear power station in central Russia in their latest attempt to force the plant's main customer to pay its bills, union officials said Friday.


After completing an eight-hour shift, workers remain at the plant in Smolensk for eight hours more and then go home, said Sergei Marakhanov, a deputy shift master.


"We have not consulted the doctors about how well a person can maintain safety at the plant after resting for only eight hours," Marakhanov said by telephone from Smolensk, 400 kilometers southwest of Moscow. "We did not find out how to live without money either."


The United Energy Systems, the monopoly consumer of the plant's output, owes the plant about 148 billion rubles ($72 million) including 6.8 billion rubles in wages owed for the last four months, said Pyotr Leshukov, the local union leader.


Vladimir Nuzhin, head of the United Energy Systems contract department, said it owed 3.1 trillion rubles to its suppliers including 783 billion to nuclear power plants, but was itself owed over 10 trillion rubles.


Nuzhin said the monopoly would transfer about 2 billion rubles to the Smolensk plant to pay part of the wages Monday and Tuesday.


But Marakhanov said the transfer would not stop the protest, adding that some of the 6,500 staff have received as little as 32 percent of what they have earned since the beginning of the year.


He said the protesters could not stop the plant completely because strikes are illegal in the sector, but its energy output is currently equal to about 20 percent of its full capacity because it cannot purchase the necessary nuclear fuel and parts.