Trade Unions in Soviet Russia/The All Russia Trade Union of Civil Servants, Shop Assistants and Clerks
The All-Russia Trade Union of Civil
Servants, Shop Assistants and Clerks.
Issued by the Board of the Central Committee of the Union.
[Note.—The first section of the document, dealing with the general development of Trade Unionism in Russia, has been omitted as it covers the same ground as Lozovsky's article.]
At the present moment our Trade Union includes all clerks, whatever their profession, working in the distributive and supplying organs (food distribution organs, co-operatives, etc.) and in all Soviet institutions (commissariats, Soviets, councils of national economy, "Centres," etc.), with the exception of the Commissariat of the Means of Communication and of Posts and Telegraphs, the employees which form part of the corresponding industrial unions.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE FEDERATION.
The fundamental nucleus of the- union is the committee of clerks elected at the general assembly of the employees of a given institution or concern. In large combined institutions, divided into big departments, each of which has a strictly determined sphere of functions, and situated sometimes in various parts of the city, the committees are elected separately every department or enterprise connected with the said institution. The functions of these committees include the representation of the clerks' interests before the management, the recruiting of new members for the union; the collection of members' contributions; keeping up a permanent contact with the local administration of the union; the application of the decisions and resolutions of the union among the clerks of the given institution; carrying out all the work of the union in way of wage classification, protection of labour, culture and educational work; and raising labour productivity through the application of labour discipline in the separate institutions.
All committees of a town or district are united in the local branch of the union (district branch, branch of the city in Government towns). The chief governing body of the local branch is the conference of committees, which form the branch; the running work of the branch is carried out by its executive, elected at the conference of Committees.
All district branches of a given Government or region form the Government branch of the union, controlled by the Government conference and the Government executive; the Government conference is composed of representatives elected at the district conferences of committees at a fixed proportion, and in the Government town at the city conference of committees; the Government executive and the revision committee are elected by the Government conference.
The number of branches of the union is 416; they are united into 41 Government departments. Thus each Government department on the average includes ten branches. At the present moment the federation unites 646,040 members on Russian territory, excluding Siberia, the Ukraina and Turkestan, where the process of organisation of the union is not yet terminated—while at the time of the Second Special Congress in May, 1919, the union counted only 350,000 members; i.e., in the course of one year the number of members increased by about 300,000 or 100 per cent. Each district branch on the average includes 800 members; and all the 375 district branches, about 300,000 members. Each city branch Me a Government town) has on the average 8,440 members, and 41 Government towns together contain 346,000 members.
To these we must add 25,000 members in Turkestan, where the branches of the unions are being united by the regional committee which only in the end of March of this year got into touch with the central committee of the union—it could not do it before, this region being cut off from Soviet Russia.
As regards the borders—Siberia, Ukraina (the Ural is included in the above figures), no exact information can be obtained up to now; neither regarding the restoration of the union organisations destroyed or more or less damaged during the domination of Denikin and Koltchak, nor regarding the number of members of the organisations which have already been called into life again, with the exception of the Kharkoff, Kieff and Ekaterinoslaff branches counting together about 35,000 members.
The chief organ of the union is the All-Russian Congress convoked once a year. This elects the central committee and its Board for the management of the activity of the union, which varries on the daily routine work and represents the union.
The plenum of the central committee is convoked every two months. The delegates to the All-Russian Conference are elected at the Government conferences according to a fixed proportion. At the 2nd Special Congress in 1919 the central committee elected was composed as follows: 21 members, of whom 12 were communists, 6 partisans of the independence of the trade union movement, 3 internationalists; the Board of the central committee was composed of 11 members—6 communists, 3 partisans of the independence of the trade union movement and 2 internationalists; after the fusion of the Internationalist with the Communist party the internationalist members of the central committee and of the Board fused with the communists, thus increasing the number of votes of the latter.
THE CLASSIFICATION OF WAGES.
The wage classification of our union on an All-Russian scale began to be applied only in February, 1919. The entire wage fixing work of the union is concentrated in the Tariff Department of the Central Committee. At present all the branches of the union have central tariff taxation commissions, whose duty it is to apply the tariffs in the area of their branch.
Every institution or enterprise, together with the committee of employees, organises a tariff commission composed of representatives in equal number of the clerks and the administration.
These commissions divide the clerks into groups and categories of the tariff net work, classifying the work of every single person, and fixing according to the tariff system the rate of pay, after which the lists are passed on to the Central Tariff Commission of the branch of the union. After having been confirmed by the latter Commission the tariffs become obligatory for the given institution. In case conflicts arise which cannot be settled in the Tariff Department of the Central Committee, the Higher Tariff Commission must be applied to the decisions of which are final in all questions of detail of principle.
Recently the Central Committee drew up a project for normal terms of labour and the introduction of the premium system of wages. These questions are quite new and extremely difficult for our union, but the first steps in this direction have been taken already the general scheme of the premium system of pay is worked out. This premium question is closely bound up with the question of raising the productivity of labour and of labour discipline; therefore when speaking of this question, several points besides the one fundamental point, that of strict regulation of the terms of labour—have to be considered, such as: reduced staffs, individual initiative, definite tasks (the execution of a definite piece of work, within a definite period) the stage of service in an institution (this being introduced for the purpose of combating the frequent changed of service from one institution into another).
In the provinces the premium system! of wages will be applied only after the schemes worked out by the Central Commission of the Union have been confirmed.
The distribution of special industrial clothing among the clerks also belongs to the sphere of activity of the tariff commission. According to the lists presented for the first receipt 138,000 garments have been received (footwear, various upper) clothing, warm clothing, overalls, gloves, half sleeves, etc.), which is about 70 per cent. of all the things required. The lists to be presented for the second receipt are not yet drawn up.
PROTECTION OF LABOUR.
The work of protection of labour of clerks and shop assisants employed in the provinces is not yet properly established chiefly because of the lack of experienced workers, who up to low have been detained on the fronts of the civil war. Besides, his work can only be fully developed with the improvement of the economic situation of the country, because under the present conditions many measures concerning protection of labour cannot as yet be applied. Therefore, the activity of our union in this direction is limited mainly to the settlement of conflicts and also to the elaboration of various information and regulations connected with the question of labour protection. These latter are then put before the Central Council of Trade Unions and the People's Commissariat of Labour for confirmation, and among them are to be noted: (1) Reports presented to the Council of Peoples Commissaries and the Peoples Commissaries of Labour about reduction of staffs in the institutions and stores and the utilisation of available labour forces; (2) regulation about "inspection" for persons serving in small enterprises; (3) "regulation about labour discipline" of employees; (4) information on the question of the 6-hours working day for office and mental workers employed in institutions with 8 hours working day; (5) regulations about overtime work for persons above 20th tariff category; (6) instructions for application of the "Regulation on disciplinarian courts of honour."
It is further to be noted that the Union has got permission to give instruction in seven of the biggest centres (Moscow, Tula, Petrograd, Nishnij Novgorod, Saratoff and Vitebsk).
In the big centres the union also succeeded in withdrawing underaged children from work and placing them under the care of the Social Maintenance Board. The detailed examination of conditions of life of civil servants, which had been undertaken, could not be carried through because of the lack of experienced workers.
CULTURAL AND EDUCATIONAL WORK.
Notwithstanding the great possibilities offered, the activity of the union in this direction has not developed very much. This fact can be partly explained by the foundation of a large number of governmental and general proletarian educational institutions, and such an activity on the part of the unions would therefore, in most of the towns, introduce a kind of parallelism in the work of the above organisations.
In a considerable measure the educational work of the union is so little developed because of general causes, i.e., the impossibility of applying a sufficient number of experienced workers on this work, these latter being needed for military purposes and for the reconstruction of the socialist state. There are as yet no complete data of all the educational institutions, training by the union clubs, libraries, scientific and professional courses. In connection with the scarcity of skilled workers in the institutions, many departments of our federation (especially in the Ural where the skilled workers had been evacuated by Koltchak, partly by force and partly of their own free will) started the organisation of courses for special professional training. The result of these courses has up to the the present proved very satisfactory, thus filling the ranks of the skilled workers.
At present steps are being taken tor the centralisation of the activity of the union in the spheres of professional training and also in other spheres of educational work, following the example of other branches of the union's activity—the financial and tariff organisation—the centralisation of which has been attained already in the most essential points.