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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2014
This Tale from the Field focuses on the interpretation by workers of the precarious nature of blue-collar formal employment in Russia. In an ethnographic sketch based on over two years in the field, I follow an individual, Sergei, as he relies more and more on informal and other sources of income instead of waged labour in the increasing number of multi-national enterprises which have come to Russia to set up factories. Why does Sergei, and many like him, still young or without memory of Soviet labour practices, ‘choose’ exit from the formal economy at the very moment when wages and conditions are finally increasing? Why is the informal economy as a ‘choice’ so important to blue-collar workers despite the hunger for labour in traditional production industry?
1. All names and the descriptions of some industrial activities have been changed to protect the identities of informants.
2. The interpretation here recalls Burawoy's analysis of “negative class consciousness” among late-socialist era Hungarian workers, where cynicism about the teleological project of socialism did not prevent class-based solidarity, see Burawoy, Michael, The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary's Road to Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 (With János Lukács), 83–139 Google Scholar.
3. A racially dubious in-joke by locals on the identity of the European plant owners: “They're all the same: Romanians,” regardless of the nationality (Japanese, German, Swedish, Slovak, and French) of supervisors at the plants. For obvious reasons, I obscure the identity of the plant discussed here.
4. Actually, assembly-line pay is substantially less than $1,000 a month. Zhenya's comparison of pay and conditions in Russian multinational-owned factories to analogous labor abroad was in no way an isolated example. Workers would often compare wages to the price of automobiles to calculate how many years' wages would pay for a car. The region's politicians took the charge of a conspiracy to keep down wages so seriously that they officially denied it in the media.
5. The region's governor, citing the large inward investment from foreign countries, had compared Kaluga to Singapore.
6. The official and legally required minimum social protection an employer offers as part of an employment agreement.
