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The eBearing News
December 15, 2004
Russian Bearing Factory Workers on Hunger Strike
copyright © 2004 eBearing Inc.
Last week, eight workers at a bearing factory in Yekaterinburg, Russia went on a hunger strike
for back wages, while over 300 others were recently fired due to lack of work.
Russian workers on hunger strikes have become alarmingly common. With lifetime job security no longer
assured or even a consideration, workers at cash-strapped or bankrupt Soviet manufacturing
plants can be forced to go many months without being paid. Then, they face the rising risk of
being fired with no pay or severance.
Employees at another GPZ bearing factory told eBearing the hunger strikers in Yekaterinburg are
from Urals Bearing Plant, GPZ Bearing Factory #6. It reportedly produces double-row ball, spherical and
radial roller bearings in 80mm to 160mm bore sizes.
The hunger strikers are demanding many months of back wages for themselves and promised back wages and severance
pay for the over 300 workers fired from the plant in July for lack of work.
In many far-flung industrialized areas, such as Yekaterinburg, workers face a grim choice. With few,
if any, other employment opportunities once a job is lost, staying with a bankrupt company for
the promise of a paycheck is often their only real option.
A key manufacturing hub in the western Urals 900 miles west of Moscow, Yekaterinburg is home to heavy
manufacturing and mining. Infrastructure products such as turbines, bearings and heavy machinery
are produced in the area. Originally a mining center, the region has several gold and copper mines.
The region was not a manufacturing center until World War II, when Soviet state-run industries
were moved from militarily vulnerable outlying states to this naturally protected Urals area.
Hunger strikes have had an effect in several publicized incidents, if only that state investigators
arrive and pay the strikers while others receive only more promises of being paid.
A recent hunger strike at an area chemical plant saw over 30 workers eventually receiving almost
a year's back pay from the state, while workers not on hunger strike received only more promises of paychecks to come.
Another 30 hunger strikers at a power plant were paid; as word quickly traveled to the 600 other
workers recently fired without pay, they gathered in vain outside the factory gates hoping to be paid.
Nonpayment of back wages has been a pervasive problem in Russia's deeply troubled economy, but as a
market economy begin to take shape, the problem has become even more acute. With massive
communist-era overemployment plaguing most factories, little investment in plant and equipment,
and few guaranteed market opportunities for their products, many plants have simply shut down
after exhausting what little financial resources they were given. In other cases, companies simply
stopped paying wages and waited to see what would happen.
Financial issues aside, Russia's communist-era legacy of massive overemployment is taking most of
the blame for the country's unemployment rate. As an example, Russia's largest state-run bearing
plant in Samara employed more than 9,000 workers. But those 9,000 workers produced just USD $15 million
worth of roller bearings.
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- by Bruce A. Carr
from individual research,
tips and commercial sources.
Bruce Carr edited this content.
Copyrighted material; unauthorized reproduction prohibited.
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eBearing.com ... for everything that moves™
Entire contents Copyright © 1999-2011, eBearing Inc. All rights reserved.
eBearing.com and "... for everything that moves" are registered trademarks of eBearing Inc.
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