LENINGRAD, Nov. 21 — Over 1,700 workers have struck the Ford factory in Vsevolozhsk near here. The workers are demanding a 30% wage increase and a 6½-hour night shift. They had staged a one-day warning strike on November 7, the 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Currently, workers make between 16,000 and 25,000 rubles ($600-$1,000) monthly.
Workers won a 14% wage hike after a strike here last February, in a one-year contract that expires February 28, 2008, but they decided not to wait until then to strike Ford again. This strike follows an August walkout in Togliatti against AvtoVAZ, Russia’s largest carmaker, which is owned by the biggest Russian weapons exporter on the world market. Some AvtoVAZ strike leaders were fired while the factory director became Togliatti’s mayor.
Auto workers aren’t the only ones stirring in Russia. On November 9, the newspaper Nezavisimaia Gazeta reported “a gathering strike movement in the country….For four days, dock workers at the oil port in Tupas [on the Black Sea] were on strike. Currently, the workers at Ford are carrying out a warning strike. Next week, dockworkers at the seaport [here] are threatening to shut down operations.”
Fifty percent of Russian families with one child live in poverty. The number grows to 65% of families with two children and 85% with three children. The real numbers are really much higher because the official poverty line is set far below the level that allows people to eat properly and meet their needs. In capitalist Russia there are four million homeless people, three million destitute and five million abandoned children.
The sharpening class struggle in Russia reflects the growing attacks on the international working class by the bosses worldwide as they intensify their competition for markets, resources and cheap labor. Auto workers are in a unique position to build solidarity globally, but this requires communist leadership. U.S and Russian auto workers met together in an international conference last spring and we’re attempting to forge that unity, one of the building blocks to communist revolution.
