Question About Trade Unions in the Soviet Union

[Labor Shall Rule]

The modern-day Russia has high infant mortality rates, lower life expectancy rates, high unemployment, and a lower standard of living overall. It can largely be credited to the creation of privatization accounts or privatization checks or vouchers, along with the swift termination of governmental boards and ministries that formerly watched over investment in their enterprises. Within a few months, the stage had been set for foreign capital to carve up formerly state-owned enterprises for their own benefit.

How did they get there with no resistance from the rank-in-file itself? According to wikipedia's "Trade Unions in the Soviet Union," which sourced Russian Trade Unions and Industrial Relations in Transition, the following obviously existed prior to the privatization.


"The trade union system in the late Soviet Union consisted of thirty unions organized by occupational branch. Including about 732,000 locals and 135 million members in 1984, unions encompassed almost all Soviet employees with the exception of some 4 to 5 million kolkhozniks. Enterprises employing twenty-five or more people had locals, and membership was compulsory. Dues were about 1% of a person's salary. The All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions served as an umbrella organization for the thirty branch unions and was by far the largest public organization in the Soviet Union.Where did the union go? What did they do during the privatizations? With such a massive following, there had to have been some sort of rebellion to the effort to blunder the country of it's resources.

[chimx]

The immediate successor to the old soviet trade unions was the Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FNPR). This body kept much of the property ownership of the soviet unions. It also kept most workers. The FNPR president in 1996 said that the federation has 122 member organizations and a membership of 45 million workers. This is a drop in membership of 5 million workers in 4 years. And really the drop doesn't reflect a disenchantment with the FNPR or unions, but the rising unemployment in the former USSR.

The FNPR has taken a semi-syndicalist vision of itself too. Here is an interesting passage from the 1996 congress. "[the FNPR is] not fighting for our place in the higher echelons of governmental power, and does not desire to establish or overthrow any concrete sociopolitical structure; we do not see our ideology as a universal one in accordance with which all society should live. [The role of unions is to serve the needs of workers, which] makes us oppoenents of any owner of the means of production, whether it be the state, a private owner, joint-stock company or collective, or any government, be it bourgeois socialist, or any other type."

He then went on to push the new FNPR line of "economic democracy": "economic democracy is not a synonym for freedom of ownership, as the term is understood by some, but rather is a method through which labor's right to participate in the management of production and to receive its share of the profits is realized."

This comes from "Russia's Workers in Transition" by Paul Christensen, which was written in '98, so unfortunately it is a little dated for what you are looking for.

[Labor Shall Rule]

That is some interesting information that answers a part of the question, but I really want to know -- why was there no resistance to the largest privatization scheme ever orchestrated in human history?

[chimx]

Well pretty much everybody wanted denationalization after the collapse of the USSR. It was mainly an issue of how that would come about. The voucher system allowed workers to maintain ownership of their local industries. Again, a 1996 study showed that 64.7 percent of private-sector corporations had employees owning a majority, with the "rank and file" holding majority ownership in 30.5 percent of those corporations.