Soviets OK Right to Strike but Exclude Key Industries

For the first time since the earliest years of the Soviet state, the majority of Soviet workers won the right to strike under legislation enacted Monday. But the same law prohibits work stoppages in key industries.

The Supreme Soviet, the newly strengthened legislature, emphasized in a day of heated debate that the basic thrust of the new law is to make clear the workers’ right to strike except where such action would endanger lives, health or the national economy.

The Soviet lawmakers, in their first major legislation, outlined the steps--conciliation, mediation and arbitration--that workers must follow before they can legally strike. And they made the courts, not the government’s executive branch, the referee if disputes arise over the right to strike.

The declared goal of the legislation, adopted by a vote of 373 to 12, with 10 abstentions, is ensuring workers’ collective bargaining power as the Soviet economy, now largely state-owned and centrally planned, begins to diversify and to respond to market forces.

In immediate practice, however, the law recognizes the power that Soviet workers won for themselves in a series of major strikes over the summer--strikes that paralyzed most of the coal-mining industry for nearly a month and threatened steel mills and railways--and everything that depends on them.

“Strikes are now a reality,” one prominent deputy, A. N. Kraiko, an aircraft engineer and designer, argued. “We viewed this reality for a long time as destructive, but world experience proves that strikes can have a constructive role (in) regulating the relationship between workers and their employers.”

Andrei D. Sakharov, the Soviet physicist and human rights activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, said a strike has often been the only way for inmates of the country’s labor camps to protect their meager rights and to win any improvement in their living conditions.

The new law prohibits strikes in the transport, communications, power and defense industries; at factories in continuous production, such as steel mills, and against governmental bodies safeguarding national security and law and order. It also bans strikes that “threaten the life or health of the people,” but it leaves these to the courts to adjudicate.

Political Strikes Banned

The legislation also outlaws most political strikes--those “motivated by demands for the violent overthrow or change of the state or social system or demands leading to the violation of ethnic or racial equality.”

These limitations as a whole were criticized, however, as undermining the basic philosophy of the legislation and devaluing it through too many exceptions.

One radical deputy charged that the prohibitions effectively outlawed 70% of strikes. But V. I. Samarin, the chairman of the committee that drafted the legislation, said the law actually ensures the right to strike for 65% of the country’s industrial, commercial and government workers.

Even the prohibitions are not automatic, Samarin said, because workers can appeal to the courts, and the burden of proof of the danger posed by the strike would be on the employers.

Only the legislatures of the constituent republics or the Supreme Soviet itself can intervene to postpone a legal strike, according to the law.

The government had called originally for a complete ban on all strikes until 1991, arguing that proposed political, economic and social reforms needed at least 15 months of enforced tranquillity to take shape and be put into effect.

Deputies immediately rebelled, arguing that such a ban was far too sweeping, that it extended emergency measures to regions that were quiet and that it undermined the process of collective bargaining.

Strike Funds OKd

The legislation adopted Monday authorizes the formation of strike committees, which so far have proved to be more militant and effective than the official trade union movement, and the establishment of strike funds, another first, through levies on workers and donations.

When the Supreme Soviet’s special commission on labor legislation began its discussions last summer, the bill presented by the government did not even refer to possible strikes, Samarin recalled, and strike committees were an unknown concept.

“The deputies drafted this law themselves,” he said, recounting the reorientation of the bill and the many debates over its underlying philosophy. “It is a first experiment at legislation in this country.”

Sergei S. Alexeyev, chairman of the Supreme Soviet’s powerful committee for legislation, said the law is an important step toward political pluralism and a system in which differences are examined and a solution found on the basis of compromise.

“Our work on this shows the emerging outlines of a mechanism of the Supreme Soviet for discussing draft laws,” Alexeyev said. “A lawmaking culture is starting to take shape.”