Illegal Workers Suffer Under New Regime in Moscow

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From: "nikst" <ni...@glasnet.ru>
Subject: Illegal Workers Suffer Under New Regime in Moscow
Date: Sun, 14 Jun 1998 05:09:10 +0400

New York Times
June 13, 1998

Illegal Workers Suffer Under New Regime in Moscow

By CELESTINE BOHLEN

MOSCOW -- After working five weeks as an illegal laborer on a Moscow
construction site, Ivan, a Ukrainian crane operator, was heading home to Kiev
last October with his hard-earned wages carefully hidden where the Moscow
police could not find them.
But he had left $85 worth of Russian rubles, set aside for the journey, in
his pocket -- easy pickings for the policemen who stopped him at the railroad
station and hauled him off for some rough questioning, saying he would be
charged as drunk and disorderly.
Ivan -- who would not give his last name -- insists that he was neither
drunk nor disorderly. But knowing the power of the authorities against illegal
workers like himself, he agreed to sign a paper saying he had had one beer.
With that, he was thrown back out on the street, with the $85 left behind as a
"gift" to Moscow's notoriously corrupt police.
"There is nothing we can do, we have no rights whatsoever," said Ivan, 55,
who is now back in Moscow on another illegal job, living a tenuous existence
in a dilapidated wooden camper with a half-dozen other illegal workers from
Ukraine, all here in desperate search of work.
By some estimates, there are as many as a million foreign workers in and
around Moscow -- many from Ukraine, Moldova and other parts of the former
Soviet Union -- who come here offering their labor at virtually any price.
Some are paid as little as $100 a month, some three times as much. Some get
paid virtually nothing -- once the cost of housing and food have been
deducted.
Just as in the old days of the Soviet Union, Moscow is a magnet for the rest
of country, and beyond. In those days, people came to shop for goods that were
hard to find anywhere else. Now they come to work and to soak up some of the
riches that have poured into the Russian capital, home to about 10 million
people.
Seven years after the collapse of Soviet Communism, the official
unemployment rate in this city is a remarkable 0.7 percent. The unofficial
rate is probably higher, labor experts say, but then so is the number of
black-market jobs, many in sidewalk kiosks or wholesale markets, but also in
the private-sector service economy. But the greatest number of illegal
migrants work in Moscow's bustling building trades, constructing the myriad
new office and apartment complexes that dot the city's skyline, catering to
the new middle class' craze for "evroremonts," the word coined to describe
apartments remodeled to West European standards.
Compared with the bleakness of outlying regions, where salaries can be less
than $100 a month, Moscow has the air of a fairy-tale metropolis, an Emerald
City rising in the midst of a depressed post-industrial landscape. Its
exuberant, often vulgar prosperity is symbolized by its high-rises decked with
fanciful towers and domes, its sparkling shop windows and many furniture and
appliance stores catering to the brisk evroremont market.
That contrast is most vivid at the city's train stations, where local
employers come to meet particular trains -- particularly from Ukraine, Belarus
and Moldova -- scanning the platforms for young men with tell-tale rough hands
and carrying cloth bags filled with work clothes and even provisions.
Not all the foreign workers in Moscow come from the former Soviet Union.
According to the city's Migration Service, which has legally registered fewer
than 50,000 workers, the largest group in this category is Turks, employed by
large Turkish construction companies in large projects including refurbishing
the home of the Russian Parliament.
But as Alexander Vavrov, chief of the service's international relations
bureau, concedes, the vast majority of foreign workers in Moscow are illegal,
and thus uncounted. With only 10 inspectors, he said, the city is only just
beginning to track down violators. The first companies sanctioned for hiring
unregistered workers, however, were not the big construction companies, many
of them closely linked to city hall, but McDonald's and Procter & Gamble.
The migrants, for the most part, are taking jobs at wages Muscovites would
refuse.
"It's like in Switzerland," said a young Belarussian who sleeps at night in
the apartments where he works days sanding and painting. "It's work local
people don't want to do."
But what may be slave wages in boom town Moscow can be a princely sum back
where the illegal workers come from. Ivan, for instance, brings home money to
help support his daughter, who is a teacher, and his son, a doctor, whose
salaries in Ukraine average $60 a month.
"I have seen a whole village come from Moldova, with women and children,"
said a young man who has worked as a recruiter for a Moscow construction
company and spoke on condition that he not be identified. "It is the
opportunity that brings them here, because they have none at home. They come
knowing there is a risk in how they will be treated, but they come anyway."
"They end up in a situation of virtual slaves," said Konstantin Krylov,
secretary of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions. "There is no one who
can defend them. The employer can pay what he wants, make them work as much
they can."
Not all migrants make it all the way into Moscow, where the police routinely
check people's documents, searching the streets for "foreigners" -- who can
include Russians without Moscow residence permits.
Russian courts have found Moscow's permit system, a holdover from Soviet
times, to be unconstitutional. But that has not stopped the city's mayor, Yuri
Luzhkov, from enforcing it anyway, deploying police on missions that often
amount to nothing more than officially sanctioned shake-downs, with "fines"
averaging about $8.
For those who do not want to risk an encounter with police, there is also
work to be had on the city's outskirts, among Muscovites' dachas, or country
houses. Arriving in bands of three or four, the workers knock on doors,
offering to repair porches or roofs or plant trees in return for room and
board and, if they are lucky, maybe $200 a month.
"We work in the summer, and then go home in the winter, like bears going
into hibernation," said Nikolai, who together with three friends had found a
job in a village of dachas southeast of Moscow.
The alternative, he said, is to stay at home in Mordovia, a region in
central Russia, and live off his wife's earnings from the local light-bulb
factory, which in recent months have amounted to bags of flour and sugar.
In many ways, these construction workers are like illegal immigrants the
world over, whether Chinese women working in sweat shops in New York City or
Mexican farm workers in California. But the difference is that, for 70 years
of Soviet rule, Russia was a country that elevated workers' rights to the
level of a state religion.
Now, for many workers in the private sector, legal and illegal, it is a
country where all power has shifted back to the employers, many of whom are
more ruthless than those in pre-Bolshevik Russia.
"If you are getting paid under the table, you are getting ripped off," said
Irene Stevenson, field representative in Russia for the American Center for
International Labor Solidarity. "The employers are avoiding an entire range of
taxes, which in turn leaves an entire range of people unprotected. In the case
of migrant workers, it is a complete violation of rights, because they have
nowhere to appeal."

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