by Caleb Southworth

Department of Sociology

University of California, Los Angeles

The most recent Russian economic crisis began August 17, 1998 with a rapid devaluation of the ruble and panic buying of imported goods, household appliances, and the old standby in Soviet currency: vodka. The devaluation led to the demise of a majority of the country’s banks and the population’s savings. But despite such a blow to the employee of Moscow’s financial sector, the view from the provinces -- particularly in the Ural where this study is focused -- was much more staid: this was a new inconvenience in a world of hardships where most workers had not been paid in several years, wages (when disbursed at all) were generally in-kind, and firms were conducting business on the basis of barter. The cashless nature of the economy made workers increasingly dependent on their employers and their own subsistence farming, but it also insulated them from the fluctuations of the currency market.

On the basis of ethnographic and participant research in six factories in Bashkortostan, Russia, this paper attempts to sketch a theory of post-Soviet industrial labor relations, in which the worker-manager relationship is the determinant variable in the development of collective labor conflicts and strikes. I will attempt to explain how and why workers accept the non-payment of wages and non-cash remuneration, the factory’s reliance on barter and the structure of the barter relationship with its employees, suppliers, and customers, and the relationship of the employee and of the firm to the market, when a market relationship exists at all.

The central research question is: Why do strikes develop in some factories and not in others, especially when conditions appear to be approximately equal? Why are sharp conflicts rare events, that have declined in frequency over the past five years? How do workers reacted to the elimination of the social services that factories used to provide? How do management strategy, the economic situation of the firm, and the connections of the workers to agriculture influence the occurrence of strikes and their resolution?

My main working hypothesis is that where workers lack mobility between towns and jobs, and where they have substantial investments in production and storage of their own food, they have a strong incentive to continue to work and avoid conflict with their employer even if they are not paid cash wages. Firms barter to obtain goods which they can offer their employees in a natural exchange of work for food. When managers attempt to maintain and strengthen the firm’s support of workers through the provision of housing, food, and land, workplace conflict is much less likely than when managers do not make such efforts. Workers view this practice as managers meeting their social obligations and characterize such directors as "capable" or "talented." When managers reject this obligation, and place reliance on weakly functioning labor and commodity markets, workers are dissatisfied and see managers as "nekometentnii" ("incompetent"), "starii" ("old," meaning from the previous production regime), or "svolenchi" ("scum bags," in this context pointing out those who benefit without working or on the basis of political connections). These conditions are found in factories beset by conflict even in a time and region where conflict is quite rare.

This project contributes to the social science literature in two areas -- the economics of post-Soviet states and the literature on workplace conflict. Research on the economic practices of the workers themselves calls into question studies that consider Russia a developing market economy (e.g. Aslund 1995; Blasi, Kroumova and Kruse 1997) and points out that labor remains bound to the firm and municipality, particularly outside of Moscow. While commodity markets have flourished, the labor market remains undeveloped; and in classical capitalism, a "market economy" does not exist without a labor market (Burawoy and Krotov 1992). In my own preliminary interviews, Russian workers say they are cash poor and have developed their own economic guarantee ("cvoya garantiya") consisting of gardens, often provided by the factory or municipality, storage cellars, and rented potato plots in the fields of collective farms. If they attempted to move in response to a job offer elsewhere, it would not come with this guarantee. Moreover, passport laws require workers to have housing and work in order to move to a new city.

While there have been studies of select industries, particularly mining with the formation of independent unions in the coal industry (Clarke, Fairbrother and Borisov 1995; Crowley 1997), few attempt to explain how the apparent passivity of the Russian workers relates to regional economic conditions (Gordon 1995 is a notable exception).

Standard economic explanations of strikes hold that strikes are generally related to the business cycle: In times of economic decline, when workers’ bargaining position is relatively weak due to the threat of layoffs, strikes are less frequent than during phases of economic growth. In Russia, however, the economic depression has steadily deepened since perestroika. Strikes increased in the early 1990s then declined sharply. Miners’ strikes are considered pivotal in Gorbachev’s fall from power (Filtzer 1994). Thus, the standard economic model of strike activity does not fit because economic decline has been from steady to crisis, while strike activity peaked mid-crisis (1992) and then vanished. Despite a vast economic decline, there is little unemployment, and firms retain their workforce and continue hiring even if formally bankrupt (Kabalina 1998). Moreover, these theories tell us nothing about why conflict, rare though it is, occurs in Russia, nor about its potential to spread to other parts of the workforce. Such contradictions point to the need to refine theories of labor conflict to include different constellations of work, payment, and state policy in the post-Soviet world.

Bashkortostan is a Russian republic located in the eastern Ural; in Russian geographic parlance, it is the eastern most edge of the European part of Russia. The republic has its own government, which negotiates the flow of resources through taxes and federally funded projects with Moscow. The ethnic makeup of the territory is approximately 20% Bashkir, 25% Tartar, 50% Russian, and the residual other small ethnicities.

Elections in Bashkortostan have received criticism from international observers as highly undemocratic and the current Bashkir government aspires to define the republic and its power structure as an ethnic republic. Elections for president of Bashkortostan where held during my 1998 research trip and Russian presidential elections where held during my 1996 trip. The concept of an ethnically defined republic is extremely unpopular amongst factory workers; "Nobody votes for Rakhimov [the president of Bashkortostan], but he wins anyway," was a common statement workers made.

In factories, all work, food preparation, negotiation of benefits from foodstuff to free cigarettes, and particularly swearing, is done in Russian. Tartar and Bashkir workers occasionally use a mix of these Turkic languages and Russian amongst themselves, but switch to Russian in the presence of Russian speakers. It is more common for managers and directors to use Bashkir or Tartar (which are 100% mutually intelligible) to make trade deals and cut Russian speakers out of conversations held in their offices.

Bashkiria (as it was known during Soviet times) was an industrial republic with many "closed cities" which produced for the military and defense industries. The capital, Ufa, produced motors for Soviet aircraft, and the region has a substantial oil and gas industry. At present, Bashkirian gas and oil have largely run out and the republic imports oil for refinement.

Timber, agriculture, construction materials, and auto manufacturing are other important industries in Bashkortostan. The republic has strong export links to other Russian republics and is ranked fifth in overall goods and services produced.

With the spring thaw in May and the first snows in November, Bashkortostan has a long growing season, compared to northern areas of Russia, and most cities and factories have municipal gardens for their workers. These are plots of approximately half an acre which workers can use as they please. While rural land has not been privatized -- it is technically leased from the municipality -- plots can be easily bought and sold and often remain in families for generations.

This paper employs two different types of data, each stemming from in-depth interviews and time spent on the shop floor of the different factories. First, I research the construction of work relations within the firms themselves. Here my methodology involves spending time on the shop floor for a week or two in each factory and talking to the workers everyday. I also have gone home with various people to see their living conditions, their gardens and dachas, and been to their secondary jobs. In each factory I have endeavored to talk to as many different people as possible: workers from different shifts and different sections. The most successful cases I was allowed to actually live in the factory dormitory with those workers who do not have their own housing.

After learning the problems and concerns of the workers, do extensive interviews with the directors and administrative personnel of the factory. In two of the six factories I was permitted to work along side the workers in a menial job; in the others, I spent the entire shift right next to workers, talking to them and watching what they did and said. I made some notes during the day and took extensive notes each evening. Likewise, in some of the factories I was permitted to conduct a small survey of the workers (approximately 10% of the workforce).

Second, I have findings in which the firm itself – the aggregate of workers, managers, and market decisions – is the unit of analysis. To this end I also gathered information on the ownership structure of the firm, distribution of stocks, sources of capital, profitability, and particularly barter networks employed.

I effectively sampled on the dependent variable. That is, I endeavored to gain access to firms where strikes had occurred and compare them with roughly similar firms (in the same industry) where strikes had not occurred. The ownership structure of the firm varied, particularly in the amount of state ownership. I was not successful in finding similar factories which were fully private, although I did interview in a 100% private small business (not analyzed here). The Table 1 below shows the distribution of cases:

The names of the factories and towns are fictionalized to help protect the identity of my informants (workers and directors) who opened their workplace, and often their homes, to social investigation. Below I describe the principle product, ownership structure, urban or rural location, general economic situation, and recent workforce changes of each firm.

Machine Tool. This factory produces machine tools for construction materials factories all over Russia, mainly in Bashkortostan but as far away as Irkusk. Partly in response to economic troubles in the construction industry, the factory has also developed a separate furniture industry which makes tables, chairs, and couches for sale through a local network of stores. That sideline generates needed cash for the enterprise, but far less than the cash-flow present prior to perestroika. The factory is in a small town of 57,000 people, approximately 200 km from the capital, Ufa. The town also has a large automotive plant and a wood products plant; these provide the employment for the town. Seventy-five percent of Machine Tool stock is held by employees; 24% by management, and one percent by a state holding company. The firm faces serious economic hardship, has not paid wages in two years, and obtains its raw materials and "sells" its products on the basis of barter. Before perestroika the factory employed more than 400 workers on three shifts, seven days a week. At present, there are 265 workers on only one shift with no weekends.

Milk Kombinat. This cooperative -- largely owned by surround collective and state farms -- produces dried milk, yogurt, kefir, milk, and tvorog, a type of Russian cottage cheese. It is located in a small town, with lumber, chemical, gas, and construction materials factories, 190 km from the capital. The state holds approximately 20% of the stock; the workers, 20%, and nearby agricultural interests, 60%. The milk factory generally pays wages with no more than a six-month delay, which is considered extremely desirable by workers in the local market. It also has cash from the sale of dried milk for the purchase of imported, mainly Dutch, technology for packaging and processing. Employment here is stable with around 700 workers on several shifts during the summer season; the vast majority of the workforce, who are women, are on administrative layoff during the winter when little milk is produced.

White Brick. This factory produces red bricks for general construction, reinforced red brick for foundations and tall buildings, and ceramic white bricks for facades. It is located in a large city with many other construction firms and substantial housing construction, the main market for its products. Its stock is owned 35% by management, 40% by workers, and 25% by a state holding company. The economic situation at this factory is troubled: wage delays are over three years, they have difficulty making payments on worker housing, and they often lack the money to purchase raw materials or gasoline to deliver their products. Employment here has declined over the last five years from 840 to 720 on three shifts at present.

Red Brick. Red, reinforced construction bricks are this factory’s principle products. It has important sidelines in bat and board insulation, but lack of raw materials often closes these sections. It is located in a small town with chemical and gas refining about 200 km from the capital. Managers own 40% of the stock; workers, 39%, and a state holding company, 21%. The economic situation at the firm is cashless but stable. There are substantial payments in-kind despite wage delays around 2.5 years, and employment is stable at 750 workers on three shifts.

Transport Cooperative. This is a large, city-owned garage providing buses and taxis for local and regional service. It is 100% owned by the a large city. The workforce is stable at around 700 maintenance workers, drivers, and management and wages are paid monthly. This is considered extremely desirable employment. Working in the garage provided security of income while working as a driver, although demanding a split 12-hour shift, offered the possibility of 50% greater pay than average.

Electro-Station. This is one of several city-owned power hydrogenerators in Ufa, which provides power to the city and its industries. It has a stable workforce of approximately 500 and suffers from wage delays currently around six months. It also lacks cash, as so many of its customers have no cash and must barter to pay their bills. There has been no recent employment decline.

To tease out the linkage between management’s economic strategy and the workers’ acceptance of those economic decisions, I identify five factors important to an explanation of workplace conflict. This section considers these factors across factories and then turns to the question of strikes and workplace conflict.

Factor One: Natural exchange -- the trade of food and goods for employment -- reduces labor conflict and the propensity for strikes where the products are plentiful and of relatively high quality. All the firms except one had substantial wage delays, ranging from 6 months to more than three years. Four of six had delays from 2.5 to 3 years, and, in general, in Russia, wage delays seem to have become widespread after 1995.

All of the factories (i.e. not the state-owned transport cooperative nor the electric station) in my study have small stores where workers can get both food (namely flour, sugar, bread, sausage, milk, salt, cooking oil, butter and sour cream) and manufactured goods (particularly shoes, clothing, housewares, kitchen appliances, and washing machines). Each worker has a slip that indicates the amount of wages s/he has and can take this to the store to "buy" goods. In the event the worker has no money, s/he typically has the right to take bread, milk and sugar, the so-called "produki pervoi neobxodimost’" (basic necessities) on credit. With the permission of the director, a worker can also take larger appliances or furniture that cost many months’ wages on credit. In all cases, the firms barter for these goods; no cash changes hands to provide for their workers. Workers seemed much more satisfied where these products were of high quality and, particularly, where there was meat and sugar, both of which occupy a central location in the Russian diet. There is universal complaining that the prices for such goods are higher than in the market, but the firms with workplace conflicts tended to have inadequate supplies and a much more narrow selection of manufactured goods. My own examination of prices in the company store and in nearby markets showed that prices were universally 10-20% higher on bread, sausage, and milk. Manufactured goods are a source of cash in a cashless economy; they can be taken on credit and then immediately sold, although it is clear that many such appliances both remain in workers houses and are a source of "saving" money when rubles either in the cookie jar or in the bank do not hold their value.

Factor Two: Low labor mobility -- between jobs and between regions -- disadvantages workers vis-a-vis management and undercuts political activity, particularly organizing independent unions or strikes. The difficulty involved in finding a new job, moving to a new location that might offer better (remunerative) employment, and the total devastation of unemployment are substantial disincentives to shop-level political activity. While plants do not pay wages, most tend to barter with the city or regional authority or utility companies to "pay" the rent on workers apartments, the gas and light bills, the water, the rent on their gardens or potato plots. In some cases, the factory also makes substantial contributions, in the form of barter, toward education, daycare, and medical services (beyond insurance which is universal). Workers have not been paid in a substantial period of time, and most have no savings. This means they have a guarantee in the region where they live and lack cash to move to a new employer or a new city. Many workers, with the assistance of their firms, are constructing garages and cellars for the storage of vegetables for the winter and receive land up to half and acre on the factory grounds or nearby. With these means workers say they can feed their families for 6 to 12 months.

Such arrangements have always existed in Russia, but currently they are being intensively expanded. At Red Brick, for example, more than half of every work day and 12 hour days on the weekends were being put into the construction of "garages" which are mainly cellars (underground) for the storage of potatoes. The plan of the workers and the management is to have the entire territory of the plant surrounded by such storage facilities and gardens. By my rough estimate this will produce enough food for 2,000 people for a year. And this does not take into account the extensive rental of further plots from nearby state farms for growing potatoes. As the workforce of the plant is approximately 750, this has an enormous impact on the surrounding community. This is not gardening as a hobby. Workers over and over again told me that if you didn’t work hard on your plot, you would starve. Entire shifts would leave for the field immediately after work and labor there another four to six hours.

How is this related to the mobility of labor? If you quit, and you have a factory plot and a rented garage or a cellar built on credit, you have to give it back. Those families that live in the "workers’ dormitory" -- almost a third of the workforce at Red Brick -- would also have to find new living space. Housing remains very tight in Russia and the price is extremely high, especially when the average worker has no cash means and no credit with which to buy an apartment. (See Factor Three below.)

The average worker simply lacks the means to weather a period of "zero income" while s/he sets up in a new job or a new town. Any cash they might have saved in rubles through second jobs, the sale of agricultural products, or other sources was also devoured by inflation and currency devaluations in 1991, 1993, and most recently August 17, 1998. To switch jobs would, at least, require some assistance from the new employers -- which workers widely believe to be in the same economic predicament as their current one -- and a spouse with a separate job, slightly weakening the dependence on the current employer. Many couples and even entire families work at the same plant, increasing their dependence on the current employer.

Another important factor is the passport regime. You cannot legally move in Russia without a propiska or residency permit, indicating your new address in your passport. This means you need to get housing in advance. In Soviet times, a factory would "invite" skilled workers to come work for them, particularly by offering places in the factory dormitory or family dormitory. Now that much of this housing is out of factory hands and little new construction is taking place, firms have few means to attract new workers. They cannot get them propiska, and without such permits they are not legally allowed to hire.

Illegal propiska arrangements are also widespread, but often these make mobility more difficult. That is, workers already have work at a given factory and have subsequently moved illegally. Thus, to take a new job could endanger these living arrangements. It is likely that such illegal arrangements would also be more difficult to set up far from home, from friends and relatives, but perhaps closer to larger labor markets such as Moscow.

Factor Three: Where the management controls housing and its construction, it has much greater leverage over workers. Strikes occurred in factories where the management no longer had any housing or had very little housing and it was of low quality. Where the firm owns a dormitory or a family dormitory (a building of small apartments for new families) it has substantial leverage over the workers that live there. Further, some factories had partially constructed buildings begun during the socialist period, and were preparing to give out such housing at low or no cost to their employees. Workers who were high up on the list for such housing -- the last dividends of the socialist state -- were inclined to tolerate whatever conditions in the hope they might receive a substantial improvement in their living conditions.

One should not get the wrong idea here: these apartments are not finished and there is no money to finish them. They still require windows, doors, all appliances and hardware, and often plumbing, electric and flooring. Even with such drawbacks, they represent a commodity that otherwise seems unobtainable. There is no credit, no savings, and no cash. Workers frequently commented that this was their only hope of receiving an apartment, other than waiting for their parents to die. They strongly desired the unfinished apartments and already were hatching plans to obtain the necessary building materials to install plumbing, doors and windows, and electricity to make the place weather-tight. Substantial work time was spent haggling with the director and union leaders over who would get housing and in what order.

Factor Four: Where workers have substantial land and gardens, political sentiment for strikes is more muted. In all factories in Bashkortostan, some proportion of the workforce has gardens and plots. And these represent an important resource that cannot be readily relocated to another employer. The influence of this factor on work satisfaction is dependent on (a) the nearness of this land to work, (b) the quality of the land, and (c) the proportion of the workforce with such plots. Factories where workers were much poorer (by Russian standards) and more unhappy had land that was far from the factory. They tended to have land of lower quality and, as a result, a smaller proportion of their workforce engaged in such agriculture.

While such plots are not new in the republic, factory plots and dachas were made available during the Brezhnev era, workers are buying more gardens and most have plans to either expand their land, where possible, or develop it for more intensive use. Common construction projects include small garden houses for overnight stay on the summer weekends, wells, electricity for running pumps, and more compact, mixed cultivation for berries and fruit trees which require more care and pest management than potatoes. Again, these improvements are immobile and further incentive not to seek employment out of the area.

Factor Five: Successful barter increases the "profit" of the firm and reduces workplace tensions. Barter influences the material at issue in the first four hypotheses. In "natural exchange" it determines which goods are obtained, in what quantity and quality, and whether or not they will be sufficient for the workforce. In terms of "mobility," barter influences the possibility that cash could be obtained from the resale of products from the company store. The "barterability" of the firm’s product will partly determine its currency for obtaining housing and paying for the gas, lights, and water. Likewise, if the product is needed by kolkhozi and sovkhozi (collective farms and state farms) it can be bartered for additional land.

Successful barter allowed brick factories, for example, in deals that involved as many as 10 middlemen (i.e. different products), to obtain computer equipment to modernize bookkeeping, a synthesizer for cultural events and weddings, and metal slag (shlak), a waste product from a foundry used in the production of high-strength bricks for tall buildings and foundations.

How do these factors influence strikes and conflict? As alluded to in the presentation of the factors, workers and managers reported the strikes within the last two years at factories where natural exchange, housing, and land were poorly provided in comparison to other factories in the region. At Machine Tool, workers struck for two days in May 1998 over extensive wage delays and asked that the director be replaced. In their words, the director was "an old communist type," who had no idea what to do about the economic situation of the factory other than make appeals to the republican government. They were displeased with the high prices and poor quality foodstuffs in the company story and the lack of imported durable goods. Moreover, the director held little leverage over the workers. He appealed for them to return to work saying that if they did not produce anything, their existing customer base would disappear and they would be in an even worse situation. But the factory, which had privatized earlier than many of the others in Bashkortostan, had long ago sold off its housing, garden land, and garages -- all of which were presently managed by the city administration. If workers had problems with land or housing, they appealed to the mayor not the director. They also wanted a new director who would allow them to use the machine shop for their own projects and to build up the furniture department and favor the cash product over machine tools.

White Brick had two strikes within the last year, each over the non-payment of wages and the poor quality of living that the factory provided. These are described in detail in the next section. The point here is that the strikes directly addressed the failure of the factory to provide in general, not some specific point about working conditions, the work day, or hourly rates. Strikes, in these firms, appear to be a tool to obtain the minimum level of substance rather than concrete demands or structural changes in the labor contract.

What was the role of ideological leadership or particularly vocal workers in these strikes? Interestingly, strikes all started with unskilled workers, mainly loaders and laborers, not skilled machinists or repair workers. In both White Brick and Machine Tool, there were workers who were more ideologically thought out, as evidenced by their articulation of the need for an independent union or strategies of engagement with management, than those workers who were at the center of the strikes. In the firms without strikes, particularly Red Brick and Transport Cooperative, there were workers who were more vocally in favor of a union and articulate about its requirements, unlike any of the workers in the two factories where strikes actually occurred.

Perhaps a more general qualification about unions in post-Soviet Russia would be useful. All firms formed during the Soviet era, and most factories constructed after 1991, have unions. The union leader is generally an administrative position appointed by the director. The union is in charge of handing out land, housing, and goods which come into the factory for the workers. In that role, it removes pressure from the director as the ultimate arbiter of all problems, and takes the workers’ criticism for the necessarily unequal distribution of scarce resources. The union also takes part in disciplinary hearings and firings, although it has no authority to challenge the director. The profkom or union president is frequently promoted to director when there is a change of administrative personnel. Unions do not have power or funding independent from management in most Russian firms. Union directors in my cases were frequently referred to as "the right arm of the director."

Perhaps my strongest comparison involves the two brick factories in two different towns, 200km apart. The plants were of similar size and had approximately the same product, mainly red bricks for construction. Both factories had additional products: White Brick, in the capital, produced ceramic bricks for facades and buildings of only a few stories; Red Brick, in a medium sized town, produced bat and board insulation for construction. The two firms had similar ownership structures with substantial worker ownership and the same state holding company owning some stock in both firms. Crucially, despite practically identical wage delays of three years, workers at Red Brick had never gone on strike, whereas workers at White Brick had struck twice times in the last two years over wages and back pay. What explains this difference?

By all appearances, workers at White Brick were not only less happy but had less land, received fewer products, and had less to eat. I will consider each factor in turn.

Natural Exchange. The store at Red Brick was much better stocked, including quite a reasonable selection of imported housewares such as electric teapots, Taiwanese televisions, Italian washing machines, etc. These items are very popular among Russian families and widely perceived as symbols of a good life. At White Brick the trade was cheap imported clothes (the Turkish sort which can be bough for even less in the bazaar) and Soviet furniture. There was also much less food. Particularly absent was meat, without which the average worker believes he will be hungry. The one day chickens were brought, there was a line of a couple of hours in the main factory compound.

Land. Despite continual efforts to obtain more land and more plots, the workers at White Brick had less land and it was farther from the factory. Almost all reported that they had to travel by car, bus, or electric train to get to their plots or to help their relatives in the countryside grow vegetables. This cost money, which meant workers often were unable to make such trips. Gardens require continual care, weeding, and particularly watering during the hot summers in the Urals. At Red Brick, by contrast, the most workers had plots adjacent to the factory or in city gardens, rented by the factory through barter with the city administration, a short bus ride away. Red Brick also provided a bus which took workers through town after their shift.

Housing. At Red Brick housing was a contentious issue; workers spent a good deal of time worrying about their place in the queue and about how to improve their chances of getting housing. The factory, however, had a family dormitory and a "hotel" for guest workers from out of town. Moreover, it had a partially finished building and was working to barter for the remaining construction.

White Brick had a dormitory for a smaller number of its workers, approximately 30 families for a workforce of 720. There were no spaces for new workers and no "hotel." There was a list for housing for a building that was planned in the late 1980s with the last workers added to this list in the early 1990s. Neither the director nor the union leader thought that the building would be started unless the regional government came up with the money. I met a homeless worker here from Tashkent who was fired for sleeping on the benches in front of the factory as he had no where to live.

Barter. Bricks are a "barterable" product in both cases; they represent one possible method to get cash for labor, despite the additional work of having to find your own buyer and arrange for the delivery of the bricks. Typically that process represented several days of steady work. The difference here lies in the power and control over the process. At Red Brick, workers would spend hours waiting on benches in front of the factory for clients to arrive. They would also search for buyers in the market. When a client is found and a (discounted) price agreed upon, the worker signs out for the bricks against his or her "salary." They client pays and the bricks are delivered.

At White Brick, the management controls this process to the workers’ disadvantage. All workers who were owed money were put in a queue. When clients came to the factory and paid the dispatcher for the bricks, this money was sent to the bookkeeping department. If your name came up in the queue and the money was sufficient, you got paid. This meant, as needed, the management could appropriate this cash. Workers at White Brick could also take bricks "for personal reasons" in lieu of pay, and they did so. However, this required approval from the management, so if you were unpopular you could be made to wait or have the quantity of your request reduced. This was an extremely contentious process that took hours of the management’s time each day.

Workers resented this control because it meant they had no say in when they would receive cash. If there was a personal emergency which required cash, workers said their either took loans from friends and relatives, or immediately sought other work, or looked for something on the factory grounds to steal and sell.

This process is extremely inefficient. First, the commodity is discounted to a price close to the actually cost of production. Then the worker invests time in the marketing and negotiation of the product and delivery price. Finally, a truck must be hired at a greater cost than that for which the factory could hire the same transport. Competition amongst the workers for the same clients also fosters animosity and further lowers the price.

The management was less successful at barter at White Brick than at Red Brick. During my time their the secured a deal for flour, almost all of which was already rancid. Moreover, the power had been cut off in the last month in the dormitory for failing to "pay" the bill and the management was having difficulty sealing a deal for the future with the city electric company. At Red Brick, the deals for food and utilities were long term and relatively stable.

Strikes. There were no strikes at Red Brick. There were two strikes in the last year at White Brick. They were both started by loaders. In one instance they refused to move bricks onto a conveyer that took them into the oven to be cured. In another instance, a different set of loaders at a different compound (several kilometers from the first) refused to move bricks onto rail carts that would then be used to load them onto trucks. The demand in both cases was back pay. In the first instance the workers said they did not have enough money to eat and could not load the bricks if they were hungry. In the second instance, they had not received any "advance," a percentage of their monthly wage, ahead of the New Year, which is a tradition in Russia. The New Year is much more important that Christmas in the United States.

Both strikes lasted two days; neither was "official," i.e. organized, sanctioned, or recognized by management. Neither appears in official strike statistics, gathered by the Minister of Labor of Bashkortostan.

The pattern of resolution was also identical. Immediately after the strike began the director appeared on the scene and appealed to the kollektiv (workforce) to work. His argument was if the workers didn’t work, they would lose their clients and the whole factory would go bankrupt. He explained that barter was very fragile. He also promised money soon. The second day workers were paid an advance of 300 to 500 rubles which at the time was from $45-75 dollars. Monthly pay for loaders was 800RR ($115). Most loaders were owed somewhere around 3,000RR ($430), taking account of the products they had already received.

Some sections of the factory, such as the machinists (skilled workers) had no role in the strike. That is, they did nothing, which was not particularly different from an average day.

Interestingly, the political consciousness of the workers at both plants appeared approximately equal. While the average worker has no political ideas nor interest in unions or strikes or politics, there is a minority in practically every section, skilled and unskilled, that can articulate the need for an independent trade union and recognizes the interests of workers and managers as antagonistic.

Of course, on the basis of a comparison of two cases, questions remain: Did strikes develop in conditions similar to Red Brick? Did strikes fail to develop in conditions similar to White Brick? And why didn’t the management in White Brick adopt the system in Red Brick, if that is what avoided the strikes? The commodities and production process, after all, are largely interchangeable.

White Brick -- the brick factory where strikes occurred -- would seem to enjoy economic advantages over Red Brick: Its transport position was much more advantageous. It could more readily receive raw materials via rail and more economically ship its bricks via road. While Red Brick enjoyed the advantage the production of insulation, thus competing in a second construction materials market, insulation production was often halted for lack of raw materials. That meant approximately one-sixth of its workforce was put on leave or clean-up detail at reduced wages -- neither of which was popular.

Why was the management of White Brick unable to capitalize on these advantages to solve its labor problems? There are several possibilities which could have coexisted. It could have been that the production process was far less efficient, resulting in a non-competitive price for White Bricks products. Judging from the condition of the line, the buildings, and the frequent breakdowns I witnessed at this factory, that is a plausible explanation. It appeared that Red Bricks managers, particularly those directors in charge of sales, were much more aggressive and more easily found clients. While White Brick had no noticeable surplus at the end of the summer construction season, Red Brick appeared to have clients in more cities, further away, and the director actively traveled to develop such a network. Another possibility is that the management at White Brick expropriated the cash needed to pay workers or complete barter deals. This is difficult to know, and the management of both factories had large, two-story brick dachas and new cars. Finally, there was an observable difference in the ideology or attitude of the directors at each plant. At White Brick, the director was obsessed with appeals to the republican administration, and he considered money from the government essential for modernization of equipment and the provision of additional housing. At Red Brick, the management had the attitude that like the factory itself, the government was bankrupt, and that they would survive or perish based solely on their own efforts. Perhaps that attitudinal difference explains the difference in the barter relationship found at both firms.

It could be that barter is the crucial ingredient to labor relations in this cashless economy. A contrast of the brick factories with Milk Kombinat would seem to support such a contention. Although milk workers enduring long hours and were frequently put on administrative leave for months, the main product -- dried milk -- could be bartered anywhere. Management often made large shipments to Europe with which to buy imported technology and packaging materials. The stores and facilities at this plant, as a result, were among the best, and management had expanded the stores to the entire town in a trade network, offering their employees special discounts. Workers viewed the security of employment, although seasonal, and the provision of wages and adequate foodstuffs as management fulfilling its obligations.

But what happens when there is nothing to barter? A comparison of the machine tool plant and the transport firm is illustrative here. At Machine Tool there was a strike, whereas in Transport Cooperative there has never been a strike. Transport Cooperative provided bus and taxi service. Machine Tool made machine tools for construction materials plants, construction hardware. While such commodities can be traded in the wholesale market, and some of this does take place, there is little or no opportunity for the workers themselves to sell the products of their labor. Drivers at Transport Cooperative did give free rides to their friends and the workers at Machine Tool did steal the raw materials for sale, but this "barter" was minor in comparison to the active search for clients for bricks.

Transport Cooperative was considered very desirable employment. Pay was more or less regular and it was a state firm with no stock ownership. Workers view this as an iron clad guarantee. They had substantial gardens in nearby municipal fields, there was a family dormitory with heat and light, and there was a building almost finished, in which the apartments were being priced at a discount.

At Machine Tool, on the other hand, all housing and gardens had been privatized or turned over to the city and the firm had no role in their administration whatever. Workers, instead, were actively stealing materials to set up home workshops and make furniture and other finished woodworkings for sale. Money from these endeavors was used to buy gardens, something which almost all families were planning to do. Workers there suffered from an acute housing shortage, in which many of the workers were living in illegal arrangements. This, combined with the weak barter position of the management, meant workers were very dissatisfied and struck over back wages and to get rid of the previous director. The management had no cash and very little to offer in the way of incentives. Workers at this plant mainly worked on their own projects and perhaps worked on machine tool production an hour or two a day. Basically, there was nothing superior to side work and theft.

Barter, or some other means of providing essential support, food, and services for factory workers, is essential for management to control workplace conflicts. While conflicts are rare, where the support infrastructure has broken down and is not reconstructed, workers become dissatisfied and active, despite their generally weakened political condition.

Counter to the expectations of an economic theory linking strikes to the presence of capitalist-type ownership relations, the property relationship of the firm is not linked to the development of collective labor conflicts. Strikes occur in firms with and without state ownership and with different types of management. Nor does economic hardship or crisis alone pose of much an explanation. Table 2 shows the distribution of cases by economic condition (wage delay) and ownership structure. While these axes make a difference in the lifestyle of the workforce, they do not appear to be the crucial ingredient in conflict or satisfaction. Workers are equally satisfied with the wages paid in the collective Milk Kombinat as those in Transport Cooperative. Conversely, the dissatisfaction in Machine Tool is not different from that in White Brick as far as ownership is concerned. In terms of the economic struggle to pay wages, delays are universally unpopular, but, in the case of Red Brick, compensated for by the social services that the management distributes. For an economistic explanation linked to wages or property to be determinant, one would expect either conflict at Red Brick (in the case of wage delays) or at Milk Kombinat (in the case of property relations). Cases studies, of course, do not rule out probabilistic explanations of the occurrence of strikes, and I would expect wage delays to be an important variable in a general model predicting the likelihood of strikes. This research, however, points to the ability of the managerial structure to provide social benefits as a crucial non-wage and not entirely economic factor in the development of collective labor conflicts in post-Soviet Russia.

This has several implications for theories of the development of capitalism in Russia. First, capitalist-type economic relations do not appear to be created on a property, i.e. ownership, basis. The emergence of labor conflict is more closely tied to the destruction and reconstruction of Soviet-era paternalism than to pressures to increase the effectiveness of labor (something no firm I have encountered measures and on which the state statistical office does not report).

Second, the state’s role remains crucial. The happiest workers are those with the state backing or owning their employer. Other national survey evidence shows that workers, when offered the hypothetical choice, prefer to work in state industry.

Third, the labor market is not functional. The reduced mobility of labor and the ties to the firm and the barter network of the firm -- these fix Russian workers where they are and make switching jobs very difficult. This dramatically increase employer leverage as worker have only voice or loyalty as options (Hirschmann). There is no real exit.

While a case study of six factories cannot be used to typify the national economy as a whole, or even the entire economy of Bashkortostan, the evidence presented here is inconsistent with a theory of post-Soviet capitalist development, at least to the degree that such a development should create a visible set of capitalist labor relations. In a capitalist economy, theories of labor conflict expect dispute and strikes over the lengthening of the work day, the intensification of the work process, struggles over control on the shop floor. If that were the case in these factories, struggle should have taken place over the managerial prerogative, the capricious distribution of "extra" benefits, and over working hours. While those were issues in all factories, conflict over these issues was individual, i.e. between workers and the union head or their foreman, not the basis for strikes or collective action.

Instead strikes are ostensibly over wages; payment of back wages is the central demand. Yet even that is an oversimplification. Wages are not paid in full to resolve the strike and workers in all factories labor for months without wages in the traditional sense. The crucial factors identified here all pertain to the management’s ability and desire to provide social welfare for their workforce with or without wages. Where that relationship breaks down, workers object, and sometimes do so collectively. Such a set of expectations is a new type of social relation of work not predict by models of capitalist development, and one which will require new sociological tools and terminology to properly analyze.