Page:Trade Unions in Soviet Russia - I.L.P. (1920).djvu/77



The largest sphere of work of the union lies in the introduction of wage rates for persons employed in the metal industry. The union has worked out a uniform scale which embraces all workers, office staff, technicians, engineers employed in metal working and metallurgical undertakings.

The wage rates define the legal position of the worker in production and cover all aspects of the productivity and the valuation of labour.

The scale establishes the standard of output of separate workers, of gangs, and whole factories, and connects the standard of wages with the quantity of output.

The union was guided in its task of working out wage rates by the resolution on the regularisation of wages carried at the second conference in January, 1919. We quote this resolution almost in full as it lays down the theoretical basis and practical policy of the Union in connection with wages.

"Having heard the report on the system of wages the Second All-Russian Conference of Metal Workers recognises:

1. In the period of capitalist economy the workers' struggle with the employers for the improvement of their material conditions, which compelled the further technical development of capitalist production, inevitably expressed itself in the demand for monetary guarantee of the minimum standard of living.

2. Under such conditions, the only system of money payment for labour was daily or monthly wages, the raising of which, while improving the condition of the, workers, compelled the employers in their capitalist interest to perfect the methods of management and to introduce new and more suitable means of production as well as to unite isolated economic units in large trustified undertakings.

3. In the period of socialist revolution which Russia is now experiencing, payment of labour by time loses its character as a means of protecting the interests of labour, for the reason that to the extent to which the State authorities succeed in acquiring the economic apparatus of the country, the economic apparatus is concentrated on the task of satisfying the essential requirements of the working class.

4. At the same time, as a result of the transition of the whole economic apparatus into the hands of the proletarian State, payment of wages on a time rate can no longer fulfil its former function of compelling technical developments in undertakings, leading to the industrial development of the country, for the reason that the economic class struggle between the proletariat and employers has become a historical anachronism in a period of proletarian dictatorship.

5. In the transitional period of development of national economy, in the struggle of the working class for the acquirement of the economic apparatus, the most powerful means of reviving Russian industry is the administrative-technical reconstruction of undertakings with complicated organs of