Stay on Job in Bid to Shame Ministry Into Better Conditions : Moscow Air Controllers ‘Strike’--They’re Refusing Pay

Dissatisfied with their pay and working conditions, Moscow’s air traffic controllers have gone on “strike,” staying at their jobs but refusing to accept their pay.

For more than three months, the 550 controllers at the Moscow Automated Air Traffic Control Center have continued their protest, trying to shame the Soviet Civil Aviation Ministry into improving conditions that it admits are below international standards.

Although their strike is now the longest labor protest in recent Soviet history, the controllers have won only a few concessions, some promises of further study and angry denunciations from ministry officials, who say that protests are not the way to resolve problems.

“Much should be done, and the problems are already being resolved,” V. G. Shelkovnikov, head of the ministry’s air traffic control directorate, told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda earlier this week. “But must we act in this fashion, by delivering ultimatums?”

Workload Too Heavy

The controllers are demanding that their workload, which the ministry acknowledges substantially exceeds the standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organization, be reduced to safe levels and that more money be spent to modernize the control center and to import better radar equipment.

Citing the heavy pressure under which they work, the controllers also want higher pay, performance bonuses, shorter hours, longer vacations and earlier retirement.

They also want a clear division of responsibilities between themselves and pilots.

“This question has long since been resolved everywhere else in the world,” the controllers told the weekly newspaper Literary Gazette.

The controllers are also demanding to know why some of the $57 million paid the Soviet government by foreign airlines for their services each year cannot be used to modernize their equipment.

“We here are all like blind men,” one controller, M. Bulatov, a member of the workers’ council at the center, told Komsomolskaya Pravda, complaining that his eyesight is failing. “Everyone agrees that our work is highly damaging (to our health) and super-tense. But how to protect ourselves--that no one tells us. We are talking about our health, our lives. The issue is plain--whether we are all cripples by the time we are 50.”

Shelkovnikov said the ministry sympathizes with the air controllers.

“I am a former controller myself--11 years in front of the (radar) screen--and I know all their sore spots,” he said. “We have a new leadership at the (Civil Aviation) ministry, and we have started looking closely at the problems people have at lower levels.”

Many of the initial demands were met, other officials said, and $870,000 was allocated for new equipment. But the controllers insist that all of their conditions be met before they end their protest.

Although there are five major airports in the Moscow region, aviation officials said Wednesday that flights have not been affected by the protest, as the controllers have continued to work their normal shifts.

“Delays are normal here,” the representative of a major European airline commented. “Although ground problems contribute substantially to the delays, congestion is the principal cause. . . . That makes Moscow no different from France or Spain or any other country where the controllers are overworked and the strain takes its inevitable toll. The issues, in fact, are the same as those in the air traffic controllers’ strike in the United States several years ago. To my mind, this protest should probably be seen as a very serious safety alarm.”

The workers’ demands were first put forward by one shift of controllers, according to accounts in Komsomolskaya Pravda and Literary Gazette, but they were ignored by management, which thought the group too small to take effective action.

The center’s other shifts, its workers’ council and eventually the Communist Party unit joined in support of the demands and then, getting nowhere through ordinary negotiations with management or the Civil Aviation Ministry, decided on their unusual protest action.

More than $800,000 in back pay is now being held for the controllers, despite pleas by the ministry and the bank that they collect it.

After going pay-less for two months, about 200 controllers decided to accept their pay, but the protest officially continues. More than a third must vote to end it.

Soviet labor law discourages--but permits--strikes, and senior government and party officials usually intervene if negotiations threaten to break down. Labor disputes usually are reported only in the local press, if at all, but the controllers’ strike is only the latest in a series of recent industrial actions around the country.

Strikes have been reported over the past year in factories in Moscow, Leningrad, Yaroslavl and in the Baltic republics. Many of the protests have been against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s economic reforms, which have led to reductions in state subsidies for money-losing plants and cuts in take-home pay.

Walkouts Could Spread

Most strikes last a day, and they are either intended to cause several hours of chaos--rush-hour bus drivers’ strikes have become a nationwide phenomenon over the past year--or to attract the attention of the political leadership through picketing.

In the past, most strikes were about working conditions rather than pay, which was set by the state, but the introduction of financial autonomy for all but a few of the country’s enterprises appears likely to make labor protests, including work stoppages, more widespread.

More than 10,000 workers at a munitions plant went on strike for five days recently to win assurances that their jobs would be secure when the plant was converted to civilian production. The most recent bus strike hit the Siberian industrial city of Krasnoyarsk earlier this month, but others have briefly paralyzed even Leningrad.

The largest strikes of all have been called in the southern Soviet republic of Armenia, to protest national government policies and to call attention to Armenian grievances. These have involved hundreds of thousands of workers and continued for two or three weeks at a time.

The newspapers did not disclose the controllers’ wages, but the average industrial salary in the Soviet Union is about $360 a month.