The politician creates a trade union to struggle for the salaries of state employees

Alexei Navalny announced the creation of the Navalny trade union, a new project, the purpose of which is the struggle to increase the salaries of state employees. Potentially, he affects 6 million Russians: teachers, doctors, social workers, researchers, cultural workers. The oppositionist’s online project will have to control the implementation of the “May decrees” signed by Vladimir Putin in 2012 and 2018. According to these decrees, the salaries of state employees should not be less than the average salary in the region. “Our task is to create a spontaneous trade union movement, which will have one simple goal - not political. We will not say: love Navalny or do not like Putin. Love who you want. Just demand an increase in wages, ”the politician calls.

Only two months have passed after the launch of the Smart Voting project, created to unite the protest electorate in the elections, as Alexei Navalny has already headed the People’s Trade Union. The politician explains the need to create it by the fact that “Russia now needs to emerge a huge, mass, lower movement for raising wages”, and existing trade unions, according to him, are proceeding and cannot cope with their tasks.

To participate in the project, you need to go to the website of the "Trade Union of Navalny", where any state employee can check his salary for compliance with the average salary in his profession in the region. “If your salary differs in a significant way from this bar, it means that you are deceived and robbed, and we will protect you,” the opposition promises. The lawyers of the Navalny team will help to draw up a complaint or send it to the “friendly trade unions”, and then she will go to law enforcement agencies.

“I confess completely frankly: I am a politician, I need people's support, I work for them,” the oppositionist says ahead of the accusations. - You will see: here is Navalny and the team work for us. Everyone lies to us, everyone is robbing us, and this one tries to protect us - as he can, tries.

Despite this declaration, accusations of populism and interception of the left agenda were not long in coming. “The topic promoted by Navalny is just another attempt to collect the database for the elections,” is convinced by the leader of the “Left Front” Sergey Udaltsov . - We work with real trade unions: with the "Confederation of Labor of Russia", with the "Union of Trade Unions of Russia". Through these trade unions, these issues must be resolved, through protests. In this case, this is a gathering for bulk supporters. ”

In Russian society, the left agenda stigmatizes the word “populism”, and any attempt by politicians to solve the social problems of citizens is perceived as a pursuit of political goals, explains the political strategist Vitaly Shklyarov : “As soon as the politician starts to talk about salaries, housing and communal services tariffs, pensions, benefits, inequality, he is awarded the title“ Populist ” - after all, he wants to like the wrong and stupid To voters, poor people working for a small salary without a doctoral degree in macroeconomics. ”

However, there is no need to talk about the operation of the left topics when the real incomes of the population have been falling, the expert believes, especially since "the leftist agenda is represented in the parliamentary opposition, which makes special efforts to defend voters who seek to express their request at least in them."

The trade union, declared as the “political manifesto” of Navalny, should attract 6 million Russians from the budget sphere. The question arises: can a politician reach an audience that is not his electorate and does not follow his media projects?

“We are considering our regular viewers as a communication channel,” says economist Vladimir Milov , author of the program “Where is the money?” On the opposition channel. - Navalny explained that those who heard it should go further and tell familiar state employees who complain of their financial situation. In a sense, it is a channel of coverage of a new audience, its expansion.

Invitation to the public trap

On social networks, many joke that the president instructed Navalny to control the implementation of the “May decrees”.

It is ironic that Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that “any participation in the control of the May decrees was in demand,” although he is not familiar with the details of the project. The peculiar approval of the Kremlin is all the more surprising that the last project of Navalny's Smart Voting was blocked by Roskomnadzor for violating the rules for storing personal data.

- We catch them in a public trap: all these years they rushed with the “May decrees”, and we have been arranging them a test for compliance with reality,

- commented by the words of Peskov Vladimir Milov. - Any speech against the disavowing of the “May decrees” would mean.

Milov claims that Navalny does not support the “May decrees” themselves, but an increase in the salary of people: “The difference is that Navalny believes that these decrees are hypocrisy. This is a declaration of salary increase, but in reality they are not increased. His task is to reveal this hypocrisy. ”

Responsibility for the implementation of the “May decrees” was transferred to the regions: the president has repeatedly said that politicians would personally be responsible for the results. The regional authorities in response resorted to fraud with statistics, explains Shklyarov. Firstly, income from the “gray sector” began to include in the calculation of average salaries, and secondly, they changed the very methodology of calculating the average salary. This allows us to talk only about the formal execution of the presidential decrees.

“The idea of ​​Alexei Navalny with monitoring the real levels of wages in the budget sphere is much larger and more painful than anti -corruption investigations,” the expert believes.

The Rotenberg Palace is brilliant and far, 17,000 rubles “on the hands” of the district nurse - tangible and nearby.

Trade unions against Navalny

Representatives of the trade unions were ambiguous to the opposition’s desire to lead the trade union movement in Russia:

“It is very interesting that Alexei Navalny joined the fight for the implementation of Vladimir Putin’s decrees,” said Andrei Isaev Unicorn, deputy chairman of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions.

In 2018, he said that his main competitor is Vladimir Putin, and today the All -Russian Popular Front is becoming his main competitor,

Which also fights for the implementation of decrees. They compete in this struggle.

Isaev is also sure that in fact the “Navalny trade union” is a political project to attract the electorate: “The project was created to achieve its main political goal - coming to power.”

“Navalny is an interesting politician, but professionals should deal with trade unions,” says Sergey Khramov , head of the Union of Trade Unions of Russia. - Trade unions, unlike political parties, directly affect the fate of specific people. The effectiveness of the trade union is that it is an absolutely legal organization: it has its own charter, structure, function. And to call a trade union just a stream of complaints, even in the traditions of human rights activity is incorrect.

“May decrees implies that the average salary of teachers in the region is not lower than the average salary in the economy in this region,” explains Olga Miryasova’s organizing secretary Olga Miryasova . - The complaint of an individual teacher that his own salary is lower than the average in the region, cannot lead to anything, because no one promised this. A complaint to law enforcement agencies, of course, will not remain unanswered, but the person will answer: “In your region, the average salary is such and such, you can discuss all the wages with your immediate leadership, goodbye.”

Miryasova says that it is realistic to achieve salaries only with the help of publicity in the media, and not through complaints: “In December last year, rural teachers from the Kurgan region recorded a video message to Putin, promised that they would declare a strike and paid the stimulating [payments].”

At the same time, the trade unions themselves note the positive moment of this project-a change in the image of the trade union in the public consciousness, Miryasov says about it: “People think that this is either something from the Soviet era, or there are gifts there. Ideally, this image must be changed. ”