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Chapter 2. Wage Arrears in Russia: A Difficult Issue
- University of Michigan Press
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Chapter 2 Wage Arrears in Russia: A Dif‹cult Issue What happened to the missing ‹fty-‹ve trillion rubles in wage arrears? Why have Russian workers not been getting paid regularly? These are huge and dif‹cult questions that have puzzled even economists specializing in Russian affairs. Since the 1990s, Desai and Idson have tackled the problem with numerous working papers and a book, Work without Wages: Russia’s Nonpayments Crisis (2000). Earle and Sabirianova have done the same with works such as “How Late to Pay? Understanding Wage Arrears in Russia” (2002) and “Equilibrium Wage Arrears: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Institutional Lock-in” (2000), and Gimpelson analyzes the problem in a book chapter on “The Politics of Labor-Market Adjustment: The Case of Russia” (2001). These studies have relied on labor-intensive data collection and sophisticated statistical analysis to make sense of the intricate political and economic processes that produced the situation and the role played by the numerous political and economic actors inside the country and out. The resulting explanations have been thorough but certainly not simple or easily digestible by most ordinary Russians suffering under the crisis. Unlike these economists, most ordinary Russians do not have the time, money, energy, or even the interest or ability to engage in similar fact-‹nding missions. Instead, to the extent that ordinary Russians analyze the arrears situation, they have probably relied more on perception. Who or what seems accountable for the creation of such a deep economic mess? Who or what seems accountable for cleaning it up? Perceptions are inherently subjective phenomena, products of individual reasoning that may or may not re›ect the “objective” or “true” state of affairs, and in chapter 3 we will use survey data to describe Russians’ actual perceptions. Subjectivity notwithstanding, however, perceptions are usually rooted in some logic. They originate from somewhere. Even when not completely accurate, perceptions often have grains of truth that lend them some legit53 imacy. This chapter will explore these grains of truth to analyze why reasonable Russians seeking to make causal connections between a guilty party and wage arrears or between wage arrears and a potential problem solver might draw the conclusions that they do. I argue that the number of grains of truth is large and thus the scope of potentially blameworthy parties to the crisis is wide, so that the most objective observation one can make about the crisis is simply that it is complex. The complexity of the wage problem makes it a dif‹cult issue for protest. Several people, organizations, institutions, and situations have been mentioned repeatedly in discussions of the origins of the wage arrears crisis . These include the central authorities, the local authorities, enterprises and enterprise managers, the general economic situation and the transition process, international organizations or foreign governments, and to a much lesser extent, the Russian people. We will explore each of these broad categories in turn. By what logic has the perception emerged that this party is blameworthy for causing or failing to solve Russia’s wage crisis ? We will then explore some possibilities for narrower attributions of blame. Within a broad category of potential culprit, like the “central authorities,” by what logic has the perception emerged that one or another speci‹c individual or institution is to blame? Which grains of truth implicate Yeltsin? Which grains of truth implicate the Duma? Finally, we will explore those grains of truth that work in a contrary direction by providing exculpatory information and thus fostering a perception that one or another party is not to blame. Blame avoidance is often an intentional strategy of elites seeking to manipulate public perceptions, and it is also often the inadvertent result of institutions and circumstances that in›uence perceptions by confusing lines of accountability. My main argument here is that all these many perceptions are individually reasonable. In chapter 3 I will show that they are also collectively unmanageable. The Role of the Central Authorities The federal government has been the most obvious place to turn in the search for accountability for the wage problem. Wage arrears has, after all, been a nationwide problem, and only the federal government answers for the nation. Blaming the central authorities has often been an instinctive argument made without reference to the particular mechanism by 54 Protest and the Politics of Blame [35.153.156.108] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:17 GMT) which the government caused the loss or delay of ‹fty-‹ve trillion rubles...