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Russian teachers strike for wage pay-out

By Renfrey Clarke, Green Left Weekly, 21 January 1997

For more than three million Russian school pupils, the end of the annual winter holidays in mid-January brought something quite different from the usual orderly resumption of classes. Some students did not return to class at all, as teachers who had gone unpaid for months vowed to keep their schools shut until salaries were paid up in full. For many more pupils, the first week back was a turbulent period as their teachers cancelled lessons and joined in protest meetings.

Leaders of the Trade Union of Science and Education Workers reported that 437,000 teachers, about a tenth of the total, took part in strike action. Educational establishments were affected in 66 of Russia's 89 administrative regions. According to the news agency Interfax on January 15, teachers at 159 schools opted for indefinite stoppages. Many other teachers' collectives decided that the beginning of classes, due for January 13, should be put back by a week. In numerous cities across Russia, education and science workers demonstrated outside government offices.

At the best of times Russia's schoolteachers, who are overwhelmingly women, receive abysmal pay. The average wage for teachers is currently about 540,000 rubles a month - less than US$100 - compared with a national average wage of 850,000 rubles. Recognising that the pay scales were scandalous, the government in August 1995 legislated wage increases. But then the authorities failed to make any provision for the extra payments in the 1996 state budget.

Protests by teachers during 1996 extracted from the government a pledge that all money owed to teachers from the federal budget would be paid by January 1. The promise, however, was not kept. According to the Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta on January 11, the wage debt owed to teachers had risen by almost 1.5 trillion rubles (about US$270 million) during the previous month, to a total of more than 6 trillion.

Nor are unpaid wages the whole extent of the teachers' grievances. "The unions complained that schools were in a deplorable state,'' the English-language Moscow Times reported on January 17, "with 30 per cent of secondary schools and 40 per cent of pre-school establishments in need of general repair.''

An important element in the situation is that the wages of most Russian educators are not paid directly from the federal budget, but pass through the accounts of regional authorities. Whether the wages are then paid out depends on the needs and priorities of the local administrations. In general, "donor'' regions - those which record a net surplus of payments to the federal budget - have a much better record of paying state employees on time than those with a net deficit. A BBC report stated that the situation with regard to teachers' pay was particularly serious in parts of Chita, Novosibirsk, Arkhangelsk, Amur and Bryansk provinces, where teachers had not been paid for six to nine months.

Recognising that education workers had been driven to the point where they posed a political danger, the federal authorities met the strikes with concessions. On January 16 First Deputy Finance Minister Andrei Petrov pledged that the sums owing to teachers from the 1996 federal budget would be paid by the end of the month. The federal pay wagon is thus to stop for the teachers, as it has been forced to stop periodically for coal miners, health workers and others dependent on the national budget or on federal subsidies. But state spokespeople have continued to stress that most of the wage debt is owed by regional authorities; it is to these officials, the logic runs, that teachers should from now on address their claims.

Outside the House of Government in Moscow, a picket of some 500 education and science workers on January 13 seemed unconvinced that the federal government lacked the power to make regional authorities meet their wage bills. The situation, in any case, had grown too desperate for teachers to be content with petitioning local satraps.

"We eat nothing but potatoes,'' Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported picketing teachers as complaining. "Or we run up debts in the shops, where they give us bread and grains....''

"We get payments in kind - for example, for all the work she's done a teacher gets a refrigerator. But what use is a refrigerator if there's nothing to put in it?''

"In the school there's no money to buy light bulbs or even chalk. There's one textbook for every three students, and pupils faint from hunger.''

Ominously for the government, one particular line of reasoning has clearly been gaining ground among the teachers: only direct protest action is capable of securing results. "Every time there's a public protest they give us our pay,'' instructors from the Moscow Aviation Institute told Nezavisimaya Gazeta. "We just hope it's the same this time.''