“ They Pretend to Pay Us . . . . ” The Wage Arrears Crises in the Post - Soviet States

fter the first round of the Russian presidential election last summer, exit polling was conducted in which Russian voters were asked, among other things, what was the most important issue in their vote decision. Their answer might surprise those of us whose primary source of news about Russia is the Western media. For most Russian voters, it was not Boris Yeltsin’s health, or the war in Chechnya, or the growth of “mafia” influence that determined their choice for president. The single most important issue for a plurality of voters surveyed was something closer to home: the timely payment of their wages and pensions.1 These Russian voters, like people anywhere in the world, were responding to a simple truth: nothing else matters much if you aren’t getting paid what you are owed. When Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Soviet Union, there was a popular saying that captured the cynicism engendered by the socialist economy: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work!” Today, this old saying has taken on a new and literal meaning. Non-payment of wages (usually referred to as “wage arrears”) is endemic throughout Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union and has been for the past several years. Although the length of payment delays varies from country to country and from workplace to workplace, it is fair to say that waiting to be paid overdue wages is a common experience for a majority of people in the region. The average Russian, Ukrainian, or Kazak worker is owed at least one month back pay, but some employers have not paid wages in half a year or more. Wage arrears have become such an established fact of life in these countries that it takes a dramatic event to draw attention to it. Last June, for example, less than a week before the Russian election, 5,000 nuclear industry workers in the formerly closed Urals city of Snezhnisk held a demonstration to protest the fact that they had not been paid since January and were owed 35 billion rubles ($7 million). Participants warned that if their demands to be paid were not met, the joint U.S.Russian program to destroy nuclear weapons could be placed in jeopardy. A