A tale of two metallurgical enterprises:: Marketization and the social contract in Russian Industry (original) (raw)
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Labor market implications of “privatization” in Russian industry in 1992
World Development, 1994
In the early stages of the industrial restructuring process, Russian industry changed property forms remarkably quickly as managements and work collectives took advantage of the breakdown of the command system, although they did not become fully privatized. The main question this paper addresses is whether the property form restructuring induced behavioral and organizational changes that had implications for the level and structure of employment in those factories compared with others that did not restructure. It also examines the impact on expectations about employment and on enterprise plans to release workers, a major initiative for Russian industry in 1992.
Russian Trade Unions and Industrial Relations in Transition
2002
The project was financed by the British Economic and Social Research Council and by INTAS. The Russian side of the project was directed by Vadim Borisov, Director of ISITO and concurrently ICFTU Representative for the CIS countries. We are very grateful to our colleagues, especially to Vadim, and to all the Russian trade unionists who collaborated with the research, none of whom bears any responsibility for the errors and omissions or the judgements in this book. We would also like to thank those Western colleagues with whom we have shared this research field over the past ten years, particularly Peter Fairbrother, David Mandel, Rick Simon, Jochen Tholen and Frank Hoffer. Researching Russian trade unions can be a depressing occupation unless one works with colleagues who are also friends and comrades. Some sections of the book are based on a report prepared by the authors for the ILO Task Force on Industrial Relations in 1996. We are grateful to the ILO for permission to use this material.
This paper intends to explore changes occurred to employment relations in Russia in the last decade, in order to understand how agents in production will react to the crisis. The paper focuses on issues of trust and control in management. The dominant narrative maintains that post-socialist industrial relations have been marked by strong continuity with the soviet past due to institutional legacies. On the basis of both secondary and case-study research the paper will investigate social relations in the workplace in order to understand whether the experience of work has fundamentally changed for agents. The main thrust of the article is that institutions of industrial relations have remained unchallenged but terms and conditions of employment have not; this have exacerbated contradictions in the labour process but not generated change because of the peculiar nature of social relations in production. Institutionalism like transition theories, lacking theoretical space for contradictions in their model, fails to recognise both the constraints and challenges the latter pose to agency [Aslund, 1995; Schwartz, G. Et al., 2007]. Our study of the Russian enterprise as a social organisation has identified two distinct but interrelated set of relations, namely owner-manager relationship, the managerial process [Armstrong, 1984, 1989, 1991; Willmott 1997] , and the labour process proper [Knights et al., 1990; Thompson et al, 2000]. This paper focuses on the former. Critical accounts of the managerial process in the ‘West’ suggest that managers sustain a trustful relationship with owners by developing control strategies for their subordinates Armstrong, 1984]. The employment of soviet managerial tactics achieves social control but generates strained and ultimately mistrustful relationship with superiors [Ticktin, 1992]. Evidence from case studies indicates how failure in restructuring perpetuates this ‘economy of mistrust’ based on administrative controls and petty tutelage. To the contrary, in cases where restructuring has been achieved, managerial co-operation with owners and tighter control over workers are present.
Core and periphery of the collective: labour segmentation in the Russian industrial enterprise
Industrial Relations Journal, 2004
The present paper tries to fill an important gap in our understanding of the specific nature of wage and employment differentiation in Russia during the period of transition. By presenting evidence from case studies at Russian industrial enterprises the account examines the role played by hierarchies in production, specifically the dynamics of core/periphery workforce segmentation, in helping to explain how the present economic conditions have acted to re-entrench specific forms of inequality. Exploring the processes of decision-making regarding employment, work and pay allocation, and promotion the paper will conclude with some central inferences as to why workforce segmentation is seen as an important means of obtaining control over labour.