Unemployment - Soviet Style -- Up To 12 Million May Face Layoffs With No Safety Net
MOSCOW - Millions of Soviet workers face layoffs this year without a safety net of unemployment benefits and without even a legal definition of unemployment.
There are rumors that imminent plant closures and mergers in Moscow will throw thousands out of work.
Up to 12 million people could lose their jobs in the first year of transition to a market economy, new Vice President Gennady Yanayev warned last year when he was boss of the official trade union council, the AUCCTU.
The radical weekly newspaper Kurante suggests this figure could be reached by the end of this month, with half of the jobs going through the closure of unprofitable enterprises.
By comparison, 7.6 million Americans were registered as unemployed last month. Of these, three million collected benefits.
The Soviet Union is unprepared for a crisis on a scale of millions and is unlikely to create a safety net in just a few weeks.
There's an air of frantic improvisation in the Kremlin as the newly invented power structure tries to cope.
But improvising doesn't come easily to a nation accustomed to awaiting orders from on high.
The Soviet trade union movement, which might be expected to speak up for the jobless, is, like everything else, in a state of flux. It once claimed a membership of 140 million but served essentially as a means of transmitting Kremlin orders to the shop floor.
The unofficial miners' strikes in Siberia and the Ukraine two years ago dealt the AUCCTU a death blow, and it expired last October, having failed to convince anyone of its sudden urge to defend its members' interests.
In its place has appeared the Federation of Russian Independent Trade Unions. FRITU was founded last spring and claims 30 million members. But just how independent it is remains unclear: its offices are in the handsome headquarters of the old official union council on Moscow's Lenin Avenue. Its deputy chairman, Vassily Romanov, used to be the official union's man in the Kuzbass coal field of Siberia.
Early this month, he suddenly threatened a strike throughout the Russian Federation if the republic's parliament did not pass legisation protecting workers rights within two months.
He told reporters: ``We face serious unemployment; big collectives are dying.'' FRITU, he said, was seeking early agreement with the Russian government on union proposals for improved unemployment payments and cost-of-living baskets on which wage indexing could be based.
A worker who loses his job now draws full pay for up to three months, then gets nothing. The union wants benefits for up to a year, gradually reducing to 40 percent of full pay for the last three months. It also complains that there's no retraining service for people laid off and no law that defines unemployment.
Romanov said he couldn't give concrete figures for unemployment now; ``Socialist countries were not supposed to have any.'' The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone the right to a job.
But he suggested that a million were out of work in the Russian federation last year. He added that estimates of job losses in the USSR during the transition to market economics go as high as 40 million.
``In Russia, they say, `We have 100,000 vacancies, so on average there is no unemployment.' But would people travel thousands of miles to get work, even if the internal passport system and residence laws did not make migration difficult?''
FRITU wants a minimum wage of 120 rubles a month, but this is already out of date as free-market prices go through the roof and state prices for many goods and services are about to follow.
The independent radical weekly newspaper Commersant reports prices in farmer's markets shot up by 28 percent in December alone and black market prices by 32 percent. It forecasts the poverty line this year will reach 135 rubles a month (180 rubles in big cities) and that 100 million people - one-third of the population - will live below it.
Officials warn of steep increases in state prices later this month. Cars, for instance, will cost 70 percent more - though actually buying one is unlikely to be any easier.