24 hours without work

Ford workers are getting their money's worth

Foreign automakers that come to Russia to organize assembly production need to seriously think about personnel policies and training loyal workers. They can learn from the mistakes of the Ford company, which was unable to reach an agreement with car assemblers at its plant in the Leningrad region and is now suffering losses of at least 4-5 million dollars per day due to the outbreak of a strike. Moreover, this does not take into account the costs of importing cars to Russia. The American concern decided to import 2,300 finished Ford Focuses from Europe: as you know, the plant in Vsevolozhsk cannot satisfy domestic demand, and car dealerships have a queue for “tricks” for several months (the first batch of 1,700 cars will arrive this week). 2300 cars is a week of work at the plant in Vsevolozhsk.

Meanwhile, Toyota, which is already building its own enterprise, and Nissan , which will begin erecting factory buildings in St. Petersburg in April, on the contrary, are going to export their cars from here to Europe. These plans can only be realized if workers are paid higher wages and working conditions are satisfactory to the union. Foreign auto companies are looking for qualified workers and engineers from Kaliningrad to Nakhodka. But in Russia there are not enough personnel capable of working at a modern machine-building plant, so the automaker is left either to suffer from strikes or to fulfill the demands of the strikers, because there is nowhere to find other workers. Meanwhile, the queue for foreign cars at car dealerships is growing.

At exactly midnight from Tuesday to Wednesday, the car plant in Vsevolozhsk, which is preparing to produce 75 thousand Focuses this year, was completely stopped. The reason is low wages, as well as a long list of social demands that were put forward by the trade union committee of the enterprise administration. The leaders of the “trade unions” understand that the managers of a Western company will not deal with troublemakers using the usual methods in Russia - dismissal, being sent to jail for a few days to think, or, finally, a meeting in a dark alley. Ford workers are not satisfied with the way they are provided with vacation, that they are not given the opportunity to choose their own schedule of night and additional shifts, that they have to work on weekends, and that their salaries are not indexed.

Until recently, the management of the Russian division of the company did not believe that the plant would stop, because not all workers supported the strike. Previously (the confrontation between the trade union committee and the plant administration has been going on for a long time) it never came to the point of stopping the assembly line - each time the car assemblers limited themselves to an hour-long or “Italian” strike, refusing to work above the norm. But just before hour X, a meeting of the labor collective was held, at which, as the head of the trade union Alexei Etmanov says, only 20 people rejected the strike, and all the rest supported it - more than 1000 workers. They were not stopped by the fact that almost simultaneously with the meeting, the Leningrad Regional Court declared the labor action illegal. It is on this court decision that plant managers are now building their arguments, convincing people to return to the assembly line. However, the trade union committee has something to hide: Mr. Etmanov claims that the court decision is not final, has not entered into legal force and will be appealed. “On Wednesday, workers discussed what to do next. But the majority called for continuing the strike until the demands were met,” says Etmanov.

But the plant administration was determined. Russian spokeswoman for Ford Motors Ekaterina Kulinenko explained that last week management had already proposed to the strike committee to increase wages by an average of 14-20% and there would be no new initiatives: “This was the final proposal, and we will not offer anything else.” The administration also presented the workers with its draft of a new collective agreement, which provides for new forms of social policy. But Mr. Etmanov and his comrades in the struggle consider management’s proposals with all the benefits, cash payments and opportunities for interest-free loans to be “half measures” and insist on fulfilling their demands. Otherwise, the strike committee promises, Ford will not receive 300 units of product every day - that is how much the plant produces per day. The starting price of the car in the minimum configuration is $11,720, but there are models that are much more expensive. Thus, the plant receives less than 4-5 million dollars per day, however, saving on meeting the requirements of the trade union committee.

Last night the conflict situation was supposed to be resolved. By the time this issue of Vremya Novostei was signed, the workers' meeting was still ongoing. The issue of resuming work at midnight and starting negotiations with the management of the enterprise today was discussed.

Ford has been unlucky in Russia in recent years. At first, it was persecuted by the tax authorities, forcing it to return to the budget the very benefits that the company received from the government of the Leningrad region and which became one of the important arguments in favor of locating assembly production here. The company managed to fight off these attacks in court. Then customs intervened: in May last year, it discovered that Ford had failed to comply with localization requirements and stopped supplying duty-free components. The plant stood idle for some time and did not ship cars to dealers, after which it managed to come to an agreement with the Ministry of Economic Development and signed an agreement to operate in industrial assembly mode - this gave a respite for searching for local component manufacturers.

Meanwhile, in the St. Petersburg metro, advertising “Work at the Toyota plant!” is heard with might and main. And this is a serious argument in favor of the strikers, as well as a reason for the administration of the Ford plant to think: after all, if yesterday its workers had nowhere to go, today they already have a choice. Nissan, General Motors and possibly Mitsubishi are coming to town. And very soon the situation will develop in such a way that it is not the factories that will choose their workers, but skilled workers and engineers will be able to choose the company that pays more and has a better “social package.”

Valentin IVANOV, St. Petersburg