Yeah, back in evil Yeltsin days you had a situation in which the government had very little money and so workers at state-owned enterprises (and anybody else relying on money from the state -- doctors, pensioners, and teachers prominently among them) offered suffered huge wages delays of months or even years. They would stay at the enterprises rather than going elsewhere because 1) the enterprises provided them with housing, food, childcare and so forth, 2) they didn't believe the slim possibility of finding work elsewhere would justify uprooting the whole family and 3) the enterprise couldn't fire them. At one point workers were largely being paid in kind, so e.g. coal miners would take coal from the mine and sell it at the village.
Wage delays do occur at present, but much, much more rarely and on a far less grand scale, thanks to the federal treasury's being so full. (This is where Putin's stellar approval rating largely comes from, obviously.)
Man, the 90s sucked.
--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Used to be in the old days that the Soviet govt paid
> a
> high premium to get workers to live and work in
> Siberia and other out of the way places where labor
> was short. Don't know if the Russian govt has
> maintained this policy, but it looks to me like it
> has. However, in the waning days of perestroika and
> under Yeltsin a lot of times workers didn't get paid
> at all, they worked, literally, for food served in
> the
> plant cafeteria, taking home enough for the family.
> (Rent was low and rarely collected and the utilities
> didn't turn off heat and power, etc. Though there
> was
> one instance of a utility threatening to shut down
> the
> power at a missle base if the Strategic Rocket
> Forces
> didn't pay up . . . .) Don't know any more how
> regularly wages are paid. Chris?
>
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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