Mikhail Tarassenko
Chairman of the Miners’ & Metallurgical Workers Trade Union of Russia

Mikhail Tarassenko

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ever before have talks been so difficult. But many more employers that usual have participated in discussions. For the first time all the largest metallurgical companies, which normally sat on the sidelines making their minds up later, have been very active in forming the very ideology of this document of social partnership. Like always, the result of these talks on tariffs is a compromise between the desired and the possible. To date, the fact that all employers have recognized the need of regional cost-of-living indexing of wages is a positive development. Besides, nobody has relieved participants of obligations under the previous tariff agreement and, thus, an average wage fixed in that agreement should be ensured everywhere. Enterprises, which so far have failed to reach this level, will try to move up to it and also guarantee a wage indexation. So, there is a hope that during 2003 we will achieve precisely the wage level that our labor union has been insisting upon.
The most important task facing enterprises’ labor committees is to thoroughly examine all aspects of the industry’s minimal social standard of payment for labor. It is necessary to learn how to use it as an instrument of raising the price of labor regardless of what professions are dominating at the given enterprise. And the standard does really permit to evaluate any profession at any production facilities and objectively calculate the necessary minimal wage level, which, above all, is an indicator of employers’ social responsibility.
Today, we have all the reasons to press for the uniform terms of holding collective bargaining campaigns to conclude labor treaties. Now, the industry’s tariff agreement has been reached and interests of workers have not suffered. There are clearly fixed obligations of employers to strictly secure jobs, retrain people, many of whom will be forced to change the nature of their jobs due to the restructuring of the metallurgical industry. We regard all this as a positive result. And I think that we have also made advances with respect to the major question, this being the price of labor.
This new industry tariff agreement contains that necessary minimum of understandings, which we could achieve in the present conditions. At the same time, the agreement states that during three years of its validity all enterprises and employers will be trying to achieve the level of the industry’s labor price standard. Accomplishing the task to ensure a stage-by-stage growth of actual wages is included in the competence of participants of labor collective treaties. And, of course, the Central Council of Labor Unions and its territorial bodies will assist local labor organizations in formulating objective requirements to discuss them in negotiations at enterprises.
We have not managed yet to secure the necessary and, by the way, quite differential level of actual wages in the industry’s tariff agreement. But it does not mean that we have given up on it: today it should become the subject of debates on concluding collective labor treaties.