Subject: M-NEWS: Russia: miners first target of anti-worker offensive
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 98 11:23:42 +0000
From: <socappeal-AT-easynet.co.uk>


What's New at Socialist Appeal's "In Defence of Marxism" web site
January 14th,1998
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~socappeal/IDOM.html

Russia: miners first target as anti-worker offensive begins
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~socappeal/russiaminers.html

In this article, Renfrey Clarke describes how the Yeltsin administration 
is preparing an all-out offensive against the miners, one of the best 
organised sections of the Russian working class. It also explains the 
steps being taken by the miners to defend themselves and the perspective 
of a generalised movement as other sections of the workers are also under 
attack. January 1998. An extract of the article follows.
-----------------
RUSSIA: MINERS FIRST TARGET AS ANTI-WORKER OFFENSIVE BEGINS 
By Renfrey Clarke 

MOSCOW - According to recently announced plans of the Russian government, 
1998 is to be the year when the country's coal industry is gutted and cut 
up, with the most toothsome chunks ready for handing over to private 
owners. For scores of thousands of workers the result will be 
joblessness, with only vague, unreliable promises of retraining and 
resettlement. 

But miners in the country's leading coal region have now pledged: Only 
over our determined resistance! On December 29 an extraordinary congress 
of miners' delegates in the Kuzbass, the West Siberian region that is 
Russia's largest coal producer, drew up a series of tough resolutions 
addressed to the country's president, government and parliament. 
If key demands were not met, the miners indicated, a general strike of 
the region's coal sector would be organised. 

Of some 200 coal mines currently operating in Russia, the government 
plans to shut down no fewer than 86 by the end of this year. According to 
the Moscow daily Segodnya, employment in the country's coal sector has 
already fallen by 18 per cent in the past two years, to a current total 
of 359,000 workers. If the planned closures go ahead, the paper states, 
the number could shrink by a further 100,000. 

(...)

In the depths of a depression, other work for laid-off miners is hard to 
find. And if taking up another job means shifting house, these workers 
often face a hopeless dilemma; continuing, acute housing shortages mean 
that affordable alternative accommodation can rarely be found. 
If laid-off miners had to be treated in civilised fashion, with job 
retraining and alternative work, the cheapest course for Russian society 
as a whole would often be to keep loss-making mines open. 

(...)

Increasingly, Russian coal workers are coming to the conclusion: the 
process through which their industry is being cut up for sale to private 
business is not in their interests. The Maritime District miners, 
Segodnya reported on December 17, "consider that the coal sector in 
Russia should be state- owned." 

(...)

Since early December the miners' protest movement has taken on an edge of 
desperation, as the costs of coal production in dead and injured workers 
have risen to horrific levels. In the small hours of December 2, a 
methane explosion in the Zyryanovskaya mine in the Kuzbass claimed 67 
lives - the worst mine disaster in the region since 1944. 

(...)

As well as seeing important strategy meetings by miners' delegates, the 
Kuzbass in December witnessed the dramatic use of direct action by rank 
and file miners. In the city of Anzhero- Sudzhensk on December 22 about 
250 workers blocked the Trans- Siberian Railway for ten hours, demanding 
wages owed from as much as eight months back. 

(...)

The assault on the miners will be the spearhead of a much broader 
anti-worker offensive, as the capitalist counterrevolution in Russia 
enters its most aggressive phase. In other signs of what is to come, 
Economy Minister Yakov Urinson on 3 December 30 revealed that the 
government plans to cut the number of defence sector enterprises by 
nearly two-thirds - from 1700 at present to 670 in the year 2000. And on 
January 6, under the headline "A Reform More Painful than Privatisation", 
Izvestiya outlined a new labour code, currently at the drafting stage, 
through which the government plans to "bring order to the relations 
between employer and employee." Modelled in part on neo-liberal 
legislation in New Zealand, this draft code would reduce trade unions to 
playing a marginal role in relations between workers and employers. 

In plotting their anti-labour offensive, Russia's rulers have perhaps 
cast their minds back to September-October 1993, when the application of 
ruthless, illegal force was enough to overthrow the country's old 
parliament and to humble the elite factions that backed it. 
But the Russian working class is not a cabal of nomenklatura losers, 
despised by the population and outmanoeuvred without great difficulty. To 
a large degree Russian wage workers, numbering more than 60 million, are 
the population. Millions of these people now have little to lose if they 
mount desperate resistance. 

The latter is particularly true of the miners, who have strong traditions 
of solidarity and are well able to provide leadership for much broader 
working-class layers. The Russian government's efforts to dismember the 
coal industry, in short, could finish up with the country's rulers facing 
the most determined opposition they have met throughout their entire 
restorationist project. 

Jan 1998

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Jordi Martorell
Socialist Appeal's "In Defence of Marxism" web site

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