Sectors of the Economy and Strikes

In the literature to date, it is thought that strikes in post-Communist Russia were largely limited to teachers and some other public sector workers (Gimpelson and Treisman 2002). This impression is created by Goskomstat official strike statistics based on self-reporting that systematically tends to underreport strikes in industry or the private sector. The MVD data probably also share this tendency because public officials have incentives to draw attention to public sector strikes to support their claims for improved funding, whereas private employers have an incentive to minimize the public attention that strikes draw. As a result, public sector strikes are more likely to come to the attention of the police than private sector strikes.

Nevertheless, it is clear even from the MVD data that we have greatly underestimated the extent to which the late 1990s saw a strike wave that affected many sectors of the Russian economy and not just the budget sector. It remains true that the leading role in this wave was taken by budget sector workers such as teachers and healthcare workers. It is also true that miners, whose militancy played such an important role in the collapse of the Soviet system, also played a prominent role, most famously in the occupation of the Gorbaty Bridge outside the White House, the main building of the federal government, in central Moscow during the summer of 1998. Yet the strike wave went considerably beyond these two most highly publicized groups.