A-Infos (en) Russia, Avtonom: Rabotization: "Trends of Order and Chaos", episode 180 - Antijob.net project. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In a number of countries, workers are seeking to limit robotization in 
order to preserve jobs. In particular, this is one of the demands of 
dockers from the United States, who recently went on strike and achieved 
a number of concessions from their employers. We do not face such a 
problem. According to calculations by the channel "Prostye Chyla", in 
2023 in Russia there were only 9 industrial robots per 10 thousand 
employees in manufacturing enterprises, while the same figure for South 
Korea in 2022 was 1012, for Singapore - 730, for Germany - 415, and for 
Italy - 219.

Dreams and legislation
Instead of robotization, officials in collaboration with oligarchs are 
carrying out rabotization. Sometimes in reality, and sometimes in 
dreams, like, for example, the former head of the Ministry of 
Agriculture Alexander Tkachev. It is very important to mention that his 
family owns one of the largest Russian agricultural holdings - 
Agrocomplex named after N.I. Tkachev. So, he said that the Russian 
agro-industrial complex is experiencing a shortage of personnel, which 
in three years could become catastrophic. In particular, Tkachev was 
worried about milkmaids.

"We need to pay a milkmaid 150 thousand so that she stays. So that a 
young girl, having finished school, then vocational school, returns to 
the farm - 150-120 thousand rubles, then maybe. We do not have these 
funds. And, probably, in the near future, we will not have them," the 
ex-minister said at the plenary session of the Russian agro-industrial 
exhibition "Golden Autumn-2024". - "There is a way. Let's do what the 
Belarusians did: there are public sector employees, let's make them work 
three to five years in production."

For now, such proposals look like just throwing out idiotic ideas, but 
who knows, in the wonderful future everything could come to this. The 
statement by the Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Economic 
Development sounds much more dangerous in the near future. They are 
preparing amendments to the Labor Code that will expand the zone of 
overtime work.

Russians are already working overtime. As SuperJob notes, 54% of workers 
report that they work overtime, and their real workweek is 52 hours. 
This is as if a person works from Monday to Saturday, and another four 
hours on Sunday. In a survey conducted by NAFI, 48% of respondents 
reported a lack of sleep. In the Sverdlovsk region alone, 110 people 
died of a heart attack right at work last year.

Mass propaganda is not lagging behind in promoting slave labor. Thus, 
the following announcement was published in an Astrakhan public group: 
"For a good story on Channel One, I am looking for girls or boys who did 
not continue their studies after the 9th grade, but went to work."

A very good story for the future of our country. Putin's well-known aide 
Vladimir Medinsky thinks along the same lines. He stated that the 
duration of education in Russian schools must be reduced, and the 
classic 5-6-year education in universities will also become a thing of 
the past in the coming decades. Conveying the position of his superiors, 
Medinsky was indignant that by studying for so long in schools, 
teenagers are delaying career guidance, and instead of going to work as 
soon as possible, they continue to "absorb knowledge." Medinsky called 
such a system an "unaffordable luxury" for Russian citizens.

Putin's aide said that soon 11 years of schooling, as well as higher 
education, will be "compressed in time." According to him, education 
will be calculated for the next 10 years, and then it will be necessary 
to "retrain so as not to end up uncompetitive." "Everything will happen 
sooner and faster," Medinsky promised. "Time dictates a reduction in the 
duration of secondary education. The fact that we have 11 years is an 
unaffordable luxury. As if we were living in the 19th century.[We need 
to]be competitive, and not start thinking about what to do at 19," 
Medinsky pointed out, adjusting Putin's jacket.

But it seems that it was in the 19th century that children were so 
competitive that they worked hard in factories just like adults. In 
fact, Putin and his assistants are dragging our country there.

There are already concrete steps towards increasing the competitiveness 
of children. Recently, the State Duma approved in the first reading a 
bill amending Article 268 of the Labor Code. Until now, this article 
prohibited sending workers under 18 years of age on business trips, 
overtime work, work at night, on weekends and non-working holidays. The 
bill, which allows the above, was introduced by a group of deputies with 
the aim of providing employers with more opportunities to employ minors. 
The explanatory note to the bill states: "Such changes will increase the 
attractiveness of employment of minors for the majority of employers," 
"employers will be given the opportunity to employ minors working as 
part of student brigades included in the federal or regional register of 
youth and children's associations enjoying state support, on weekends."

The bill was supported by United Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party 
of Russia, the New People faction abstained from giving an opinion, A 
Just Russia and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation refused to 
support the initiative, but were afraid to confirm their position - in 
the end, there were no votes "against" (24 deputies clicked the 
"abstain" button, 326 votes were cast "for"). The bill surprised the 
trade union side of the Russian Tripartite Commission for the Regulation 
of Social and Labor Relations. "Work on weekends is allowed only in 
cases of extreme necessity, which does not include work in a student 
brigade," the trade unions noted.

There is Article 113 of the Labor Code of the Russian Federation, which 
contains a general ban on involving people in work on weekends and 
non-working holidays. Exceptions are:

1) prevention of disasters, industrial accidents, or elimination of the 
consequences of a disaster, industrial accident, or natural disaster;

2) prevention of accidents, destruction of or damage to the property of 
the employer, state or municipal property;

3) performing work that is necessary due to the introduction of a state 
of emergency or martial law, or urgent work in emergency situations, 
that is, in the event of a disaster or threat of disaster.

But, as we know, our native capitalists are in the most emergency 
situation. They need to pay 150,000 to milkmaids, but they do not want to.

In addition to children, laborization naturally affects migrants. Thus, 
the Minister of Social Protection Anton Kotyakov proposed to establish 
the obligation of labor migrants to compensate for the costs of arrival 
incurred by employers in the event of their early dismissal.

This is not a new idea of the Ministry of Labor. A year ago, they tried 
to introduce it into the law on employment, extending it to Russian 
shift workers. Meanwhile, the reasons for early dismissal can be 
different - a tragedy in the family, brutal living conditions, illness, 
etc. Nothing like this, of course, was taken into account in the texts 
of the Ministry of Labor.

Migrants are a traditional target for all sorts of prohibitive 
initiatives. Many regions have imposed bans on migrants working in 
various industries, from taxis to science. But if the state plays on 
anti-migrant sentiments, this does not mean that it will treat locals 
better.

Harsh reality
Here, for example, is a story from Naberezhnye Chelny. There is a severe 
shortage of workers in the catering industry of local educational 
institutions. It is no wonder, because their salaries are truly 
miserable. People are constantly quitting, and no one wants to work in 
the canteens. Workers in school and kindergarten canteens told local 
media about this.

"I worked at my last place of work, at school, for 11 years. In five 
years, my salary was never indexed," says the production manager, who 
worked in the catering industry for about 30 years. This year, she 
decided to quit. "I still get 38 thousand rubles. Moreover, I work two 
jobs, six days a week (children also study on Saturdays), from 5 a.m. to 
5 p.m. Cooks with the same schedule receive 25 thousand rubles, kitchen 
workers - from 10 to 15 thousand rubles. It was very hard to leave, but 
I realized that I wanted to receive decent money.

After leaving, I found out that all the cooks also decided to quit. Now 
I work as a production manager in the plant canteen - I receive 98 
thousand rubles."

"Working as a cook in a kindergarten, I received 15 thousand rubles. 
This is for five days a week, from five or six in the morning until 16 
in the evening. I am a single mother, I have two children, I have an 
elderly mother, it is impossible to live on a meager salary. Today it is 
a little easier - I receive 45-50 thousand rubles, working as an 
operator at the plant. I had to give up my favorite profession, which I 
studied for," says a former cook of the kindergarten, who also left for 
the plant.

With such a miserable salary, canteen workers are also heavily 
overloaded. In one of the schools, the director commented on the 
situation: "If a person works only for his own salary, he will not 
receive more than 20 thousand in hand. He needs to work at least for two 
in order to receive at least a more or less decent salary. For example, 
there should be four cooks and three kitchen workers on staff, but only 
one or two work. Often the headmistress has to perform the functions of 
a cook, kitchen worker or cashier." The introduction of free meals in 
elementary schools also complicated the situation. The workload has 
increased, and no one has remembered about the salaries of workers.

The authorities are no better with medical workers. Since 2014, doctors 
from the Central District Hospital in the village of Tavrichanka, 
Nadezhdinsky District, Primorye, have been living in the building of an 
old clinic on Karl Marx Street, which was provided to them as official 
housing. All these years, the doctors were promised that the building 
would be converted into residential premises and registered in their 
name under a social tenancy agreement. The promises ended in July 2024, 
when a paper was hung on the doctors' housing demanding that they vacate 
the apartments by September 1.

One of the medical workers living there, Ekaterina, who has been working 
at the local hospital for 16 years, says that the head doctor moved them 
in, and from the very beginning the workers were told that the process 
of converting the house into residential was already underway, and that 
the documents were already being prepared. "They said the same thing in 
2020 - the head of the district personally came to us and said, like, 
let all the services, the BTI, work is underway, it's just not a fast 
process. We have been maintaining the house in good condition all this 
time: we changed the septic tanks at our own expense, the plaster, and 
if something fell off, we also patched it up," says Ekaterina.

Faced with eviction, the doctors turned to the head of the district with 
questions. The doctors were told that they would indeed have to move, 
but they "took pity" and moved the deadline to October 15. According to 
the administration, the house is being prepared for conservation and 
privatization, and there is no money to convert it into residential 
premises. "We did not talk about any privatization at all, we were all 
happy with social rent!" says Ekaterina. - 15 people moved in there. 
Then in September, the house was cut off from electricity. Many left. 
Yesterday, the house was disconnected from the heating. A family with 
two children and another family with a disabled child remain in the 
house. I moved out with the child - my husband stayed in our apartment. 
Makes sure that looters don't loot the house: they've already started 
knocking down the doors and knocking. So my husband spends the night there."

In general, local medicine is in a deplorable state. The Nadezhdinskaya 
Central District Hospital is critically short of personnel. After the 
death of a six-year-old boy, to whom the ambulance did not have time to 
get, representatives of the Ministry of Health called the doctors for a 
talk. The doctors talked about the shortage of official transport, 
drivers and paramedics, the officials listened and left. Now, in 
addition to all of the above, the eviction of doctors from their homes 
has been added.

In general, instead of robotizing the economy, the authorities at all 
levels are promoting slave labor for pennies. And this trend will only 
intensify.

Well, that's all for today! We remind you that in "Trends of Order and 
Chaos" the participants of Autonomous Action and other authors give 
anarchist assessments of current events. Listen to us on YouTube, 
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