Car Strike Is Sign of New Labor Trends

The strike at the giant AvtoVAZ automobile plant highlights the failure of the makers of the Zhiguli and Lada cars to adapt to a market economy and of Russian labor unions to represent workers' interests, industry analysts said Tuesday.


AvtoVAZ, one of the country's biggest carmakers, sent 40,000 of its 130,000 workers on a four-day forced leave Tuesday, after workers at the assembly plant went on strike last week to protest late payment of their salaries.


The stoppage has already cost the company at least 45 billion rubles ($16.7 million) according to management spokesmen, and Tuesday AvtoVAZ raised the ticket price of its cars by 20 percent in order to counter that cost, The Associated Press reported.


According to industry analysts, the dispute offers a rare insight into workings of Russia's changing labor movement.


The strikers at the assembly plant have been led by the small independent trade union Yedineniye, or Unity, which comprises a small proportion of the AvtoVAZ workforce, said Sergei Selivanov, deputy head of the factory's official trade union.


Selivanov, whose union represents the majority of AvtoVAZ workers, said his organization did not take part in the strike and accused Yedineniye of igniting pointless hostility between management and the workforce.


"Any problem can be solved over the negotiating table," he said. "There is no need in setting off to fight."


He said that the director of AvtoVAZ had already signed orders to fire 30 of the striking workers. Representatives of Yedineniye could not be reached for comment Tuesday.


Alexei Surikov, the first deputy head of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, also called the strike "a provocation" and said the federation would not support it, although it would hold nationwide meetings and demonstrations to protest non-payment of salaries on Oct. 27.


The strike at AvtoVAZ started last week in a row over salary arrears. But whereas the factory's trade union decided to negotiate with AvtoVAZ management, Yedineniye downed tools.


That difference in approach between the established unions and their newly-formed independent competitors apparently is not unusual.


"When speaking about organizing an active opposition to management, or talking to top governmental officials, new independent unions are more effective than the old ones," said Leonid Gordon, an expert with the Institute of World Economy and International Relations.


He said that established trade unions, which have adjusted little to meet the new economic conditions, preferred to unite with management against the government to press for better conditions for their industries.


"So long as there is a chance of shifting the consequences of their own inability to adjust to the market economy onto the government, most trade unions will unite with management against it," said Oleg Vite, an expert with the Center for Economic Reforms.


The government still spends vast sums of rubles on sustaining behemoths of Russian industrial production such as AvtoVAZ and has interceded for them on other fronts as well.


Earlier this year, the automobile lobby pressured the government into raising import tariffs on foreign cars to 215 percent, protecting domestically made automobiles from competition on the Russian market.


According to Vite, attempts to press the government for special conditions favoring their industry make up the vast majority of trade unions' activities in Russia.


As an example, he quoted a strike at the Bilibinskaya nuclear power station earlier this year, when trade unions together joined management to threaten the government with shutting the station down, if it did not receive more money to raise salaries and to resolve the problem of non-payment by electricity consumers.