Sarah Hinz

Focus: alternative trade unions in the transnational automotive industry in Russia.
traditional unions associated with state control; new alternative unions in Russia are particularly associated with political opposition and radicalism.
Analysis of recent (2008-present) activities to mobilise automotive workers in multinational and domestic owned plants.
Due to draconian labour laws, often activists resort to work-to-rule and indirect methods of resistance/protest.
At the same time their activities resemble both political entryism and left agitation in the face of a hostile and authoritarian state.
Is this a barometer of wider working-class power and opposition in post-socialism? What are the prospects for their semi-formal, semi-informal insurgency against neocapitalism?

This article draws on ethnographic work carried out since 2009
on workers and automotive unions in Kaluga, Russia. The contrast
between secure and temporary contract workers in foreign-owned car
plants is a focus of activism among emerging alternative trade unions
in Kaluga. Workers in both the ‘new’ production-scape of high-tech
foreign-owned automotive assembly, and the ‘old’ low-tech Soviet
production contexts articulate similar interpretive understandings
of what constitutes ‘precarious’ work: lack of autonomy and the lack
of a ‘social wage’ generally in labour. We interrogate this through
in-depth interviews with unionised and non-unionised workers in the
auto sector and other industries locally. A divide emerges between
workers who go to work for the car plants, and those who remain in
Soviet-types firms and who reject the labour relations model that
it offers and which they understand to contrast with a traditional
‘paternalistic’ Russian model.

This article compares industrial relations in production sites in Slovakia and Russia owned by a single transnational automotive firm, Volkswagen. We analyse the empirical data using a working-class power approach. In Slovakia, associational and institutional power is well developed and influenced by the model of German work councils, but structural power is weakly exercised and unions rely on non-conflictual engagement with management. In Russia, structural working-class power remains strong, but the opportunities for transforming this into lasting associational, let alone institutional power, remain limited; thus, new unions make use of unconventional methods of protest to promote worker interests.