Page:Trade Unions in Soviet Russia - I.L.P. (1920).djvu/38



Russia is the only country in the world where wages for all categories of labour are regulated on a national scale and where this regulation is carried out by the trade unions. In this work the Russian trade unions had to start right from the very beginning. Previous to the February Revolution, 1917, there was no such thing as collective bargaining for the reason that there were no mass trade unions. In the large majority of cases individual workers entered into agreements with individual employers. Strikes were of a spontaneous character; neither the working class as a whole nor separate trades had any organised influence on the rate of wages. There were no labour statistics. The unions that were in existence had very little material, information was gathered chiefly by factory inspectors and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, while the figures concerning wages, minimum standard of living, number of workers and the length of the labour day were the only information upon which one could operate, and when the revolution broke out the unions had to start literally from the very beginning, having to carry out in a very short time a task which the British, German and American trade unions carried out during a period of many decades. The first difficulty met with in the regulation of wages on a national scale was the absence of any apparatus, material, and experienced people who could raise this work to its proper level.

The second serious obstacle which prevented the regulation of wages on a national scale was the disorganisation of national economic organisations resulting from the war, the jumpy rise in the cost of articles of primary necessity, the instability of the monetary unit and the extreme scarcity of food and general scarcity of commodities. All these, in conjunction with the acuteness of the civil war, prevented the establishment of stable standards and the convulsive efforts of the working class to shake off the Russian and world counter-revolution deprived the trade unions of all possibilities of converting the regulation of wages into an actual regulation of national economy.

If in establishment of wage rates the British trade unions had to take into consideration the state of the market, the general economic position and the potentialities of the country, then so much more had this to be taken into consideration in Russia, where the workers have no one to whom to put forward their demands unless it be to themselves. The Russian trade unions do not "negotiate" with anybody, they do not demand "increase" in wages or the introduction of new forms of payment, but establish all these things themselves. All wage rates, etc., worked out by the trade unions are handed to the Wages Department of the All-Russia Central Council of Trade Unions for the purpose of establishing a uniform wage policy and there the wage rates are finally worked out, systematised and signed and then confirmed by the Commissariat of Labour. Not one institution in Soviet Russia may establish or change wage rates without or apart from the corresponding trade union. Under those circumstances the trade unions cannot but approach the