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The Anatomy of Impatience: Exploring Factors behind 2020 Labor Unrest in

Belarus
Word count: 2991 total, 2483 without footnotes
Volodymyr Artiukh, PhD.
Research fellow at New Europe College, Bucharest.
Contact: [email protected]

Abstract

The wave of labor unrest that accompanied Belarusian post-election protests had no
precedents in the country's independent history or recent post-Soviet political protest
mobilizations, involving 88 enterprises/organizations in all provinces of the country.
This goes against the pessimistic expectations of the existing literature on the sociology
and anthropology of the post-Soviet working class that stresses its weakness in terms of
organization and structural and material resources. This paper addresses the puzzle of
the unexpected activation of the seemingly passive Belarusian working class, relying on
a database of workplace-related protest events (August 10-September 30) and a
selection of statements, interviews, and social media discussions among participants of
the protests.

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The Anatomy of Impatience: Factors behind 2020 Labor Unrest in

Belarus

Introduction

The wave of labor unrest that accompanied the Belarusian post-election protests had no
precedents in the country's independent history. It overshadowed any previous labor
protests in Belarus since 1991 by its geographic spread, the number of workers and
companies/organizations involved, and the number of economic sectors affected. This
goes against the pessimistic expectations prevalent in the existing literature on the
sociology and anthropology of the post-Soviet working class that stress its weakness in
terms of organization, structural and material resources. This paper addresses the
puzzle of an unexpected activation of the seemingly passive Belarusian working class.

Since the first mentions of labor unrest on August 10 and until the last day of
monitoring (September 31), there were reports of protest activity on at least 88
industrial, trade and service companies as well as educational, medical and media
organizations, almost all of them state-owned and/or budget-financed. The revenue of
the thirty largest of them amounts to almost a third of Belarusian GDP 1. Although
protesters as well as the media often describe these events as ”strikes”, I prefer talking
about labor unrest: an expression of workers’ discontent in the form of spontaneous or
organized gatherings, walkouts, petition campaigns, demonstrations, and/or work
disruption.

Although, as demonstrated below, strikes proper constitute a small share of the

repertoire of contention, the emergence of these large-scale labor-related protests
constitutes a puzzle, given that the scholarship on postsocialist labor stresses primarily
workers’ patience2 and the weakness of their resistance capacities 3. Specifically in the

1
Dada Lindell and Ivan Tkachev, “Kakov maschtab protestov na predpriyatiyakh v Belorussii,” RBC, August 26, 2020,
https://www.rbc.ru/economics/26/08/2020/5f453d989a79477eb37e2d96.
2
Sarah Ashwin, Russian Workers: The Anatomy of Patience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
3
Stephen Crowley, “Explaining Labor Weakness in Post-Communist Europe: Historical Legacies and Comparative Perspective,” East
European Politics and Societies: And Cultures 18, no. 3 (August 25, 2004): 394–429; David Ost, “The Peculiarities of Communism and the
Emergence of Weak Unions in Poland,” in Working through the Past, ed. Teri L. Caraway, Maria Lorena Cook, and Stephen Crowley (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 82–102; Stephen Crowley, “Russia’s Labor Legacy: Making Use of the Past,” in Working through the
Past, ed. Teri L. Caraway, Maria Lorena Cook, and Stephen Crowley (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 122–41.

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Belarusian case, researchers note bureaucratic control at workplaces, workers’

atomization4, and the suppression of their voice5.

Addressing the puzzle of the unexpected impatience of the seemingly passive

Belarusian working class, I follow those authors who look at signs of relative strength of
postsocialist workers by analysing “moments of struggle”6 and the agency of labor
organizations in overcoming the challenges of mobilization, confrontation, and political
alignments7. The task of this article is to suggest hypotheses about the factors behind
the unusual level of labor unrest within the broad protest movement in Belarus.

Methodologically I rely on data-gathering techniques applied in empirical studies of

other post-Soviet countries8. I have compiled a database of labor-related protest events
(August 10-September 31) and performed a content analysis of a selection of
statements, interviews, and social media discussions among participants of the protests.
The structure of the database is adopted from the Ukrainian Protest and Coercion Data
project9. The unit of analysis is a protest event with the actors identified or self-
identified as workers; the repertoire of collective actions is expanded to reflect
Belarusian realities (gatherings and petitions added as types of action; economic unit
added as a variable). The data have been gathered manually from online media and
telegram channels.

The rest of the article is structured as follows. The first section analyses the dynamics of
labor-related protests, their repertoire of contention, and the response of the state. The
second section explores hypotheses about the factors behind this protest wave. By way
of conclusion, I offer reflections on the future of the labor movement in Belarus.

1. Rise and fall of workers’ militancy

4
Hanna Danilovich and Richard Croucher, “Labor Management in Belarus: Transcendent Retrogression,” Journal of Communist Studies
and Transition Politics 27, no. 2 (June 2011): 241–62.
5
Hanna Danilovich, “Struggling to Be Heard: The Past and Present of Employee Voice in Belarus,” Advances in Industrial and Labor
Relations 23 (December 2, 2016): 105–35.
6
Mihai Varga, “‘Working-Class Heresies’: Ideology in Protests of Ukrainian Workers During the World Economic Crisis 2009–2012,”
Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 20, no. 2–3 (December 8, 2012): 108.
7
Mihai Varga, Worker Protests in Post-Communist Romania and Ukraine: Striking with Tied Hands (Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 2014).
8
Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Far Right Participation in the Ukrainian Maidan Protests: An Attempt of Systematic Estimation,” European Politics
and Society 17, no. 4 (October 1, 2016): 453–72 Oksana Dutchak, “Unite or Fall: Labor Protests in Ukraine in the Face of the Crises,”
Intersections East European Journal of Society and Politics 1, no. 3 (2015): 140–57; Stephen Crowley and Irina Olimpieva, “Labor Protests
and Their Consequences in Putin’s Russia,” Problems of Post-Communism 65, no. 5 (September 3, 2018): 344–58.
9
Conducted by a team of Ukrainian sociologists lead by Volodymyr Ishchenko in 2013-2014; more details at
https://www.cslr.org.ua/en/ukrainian-protest-and-coercion-data-project/.

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After ten years of stagnating wages and seven years of acquiescence at workplaces,
within a brief period between August 10 and September 31, 2020, Belarus saw 168
labor-related protest events at 88 economic units. This protest wave peaked on the
second and third week of August: almost half of all the reported protest events (49%)
happened on August 13-14 and the second peak was on August 17-18 with 15% of all
protests. The last large mass protest (August 23) was a march of workers from six
Minsk enterprises to the city center (“March of the new Belarus”). After that the
intensity of labor-related protests fell drastically (15 instances) and repressions
escalated (21 instances, mostly arrests).

At the height of the unrest, in mid-August, both enterprise management and state
authorities seemed disoriented and even cooperative. In an informal arrangement, the
management sometimes supported workers, often met with them on enterprises’
premises, allowed workers to “go for a walk” and take a leave of absence in exchange of
not showing up on their enterprise’s territory. September, in contrast, was dominated
by reprisals: dismissals of active workers for absenteeism, harassment by management,
detentions (sometimes on the shopfloor) and arrests of labor activists. All the tools of
bureaucratic despotism at workplaces were put into use: non-renewal of fixed-term
contracts, job flexibility, withholding of bonuses, and harassment by deputy directors
for ideology.

Workers were also initially predisposed to dialogue. According to my calculations, a

relative majority of protest events (70 out of 143) between August 10 and August 20
were limited to spontaneous and later organized short-term gatherings in groups of
dozens to hundreds of workers inside their factory gates. These meetings would happen
once or twice a day, involve factory management, trade union, and local officials; they
would most often occur once or twice a week. Such meetings would often happen
outside of working time and not lead to a shutdown of a plant or its departments. Their
outcomes were signature gathering for strike warning statements, collective petitions,
including those signed by the so-called ‘yellow’ trade unions, creation of strike
committees, withdrawal from “yellow” (employer-dominated) trade unions.

Strikes proper involving a partial or full shutdown of plant divisions happened rarely
(12 occasions): at two departments of the Hrodna Azot chemical plant on August 13, at
most mines of the Belaruskali potash company on August 17-19; several reported work

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stoppages at the Belarusian Metallurgical Plant and the Hrodna Construction Company
among a few others. The crucial shift in the repertoire of contention happened on
August 26, when the leader of the Belarusian Congress of Democratic Trade Unions
(BCDTU) announced that the workers’ movement would switch to a “work-to-rule”
tactic (reportedly employed at the Minsk Tractor Plant, Belaruskali, and the Minsk
Automobile Plant). It is not clear yet how widespread this tactic has been, given the
ample arsenal of punitive tools at management~s disposal——from withholding
bonuses to threatening financial and criminal charges—and workers' dependency on
plant-mediated welfare provision (including subsidized housing and loans). This phase
was accompanied by symbolic actions on the shopfloor (banners, flags) and three
episodes of individual workers refusing to leave the mines in Salihorsk.

Workers organized to protest in an extremely adverse institutional environment.

Belarusian labor organizations are notoriously segregated into the state-controlled
Federation of Trade Unions (FTU) that covers almost every employee, and four BCDTU
unions counting less than 10,000 members in total 10. In the first protest week the state-
controlled unions, surprisingly, responded to pressure from their rank-and-file
members: in several cases local trade union organizations signed letters condemning
fraudulent elections and police brutality; the central body of the FTU, however,
disciplined them swiftly. The alternative trade unions were not visibly active until the
second week of the protests, and strike committees appeared as active organizers on
the second week of the labor unrest.

Strike committees at the Belaruskali potash company started forming on August 17 and
merged into an enterprise-wide committee on August 18. The Hrodna city strike
committee was formed on the same day, reportedly uniting workers at 21 companies. In
parallel, the Belarusian Congress of Democratic Trade Unions announced the formation
of a national strike committee. Within the next days, strike committees were established
at the Minsk Tractor Plant, the Minsk Automobile Plant (August 20), and several other
enterprises. Workers’ representatives entered the opposition Coordination Council,
constituting 12 out of 52 members. Strike committees have actively worked with trade
unions, the most notable case being Belaruskali where the Independent Miners’ Union
was at the frontline of struggle (Belaruskali workers account for the largest share—
10
Marta Kahancova, “Trade Unions and Professional Associations as Civil Society Actors Working on the Issues of Labor Rights and Social
Dialogue in Eastern Partnership Countries” (Bratislava, 2020), https://www.celsi.sk/media/research_reports/RR_35_d9jxqmA.pdf.

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14%—of all protest events, followed by the Minsk Tractor Plant with 11%). Other
alternative unions also participated and reported a significant growth in membership.
After the shift toward work-to-rule tactics, the Coordination Council in cooperation with
the alternative trade unions and strike committees established an “Online Trade Union”
initiative that would enable secret application for membership in a trade union.

Thus this was the most numerous, the most geographically diverse and the most
sustained labor unrest since the strikes of April 1991 11. Subsequent labor protests had
been either localized (the Salihorsk miners’ protests in 1993) or short-lived (the
transportation workers’ strike in Homel and Minsk in 1995; trade union-organized
protests in 1998-200112) or both (wild cat strikes in 2011-2013 13). It was also the first
large-scale labor protest to happen as part of a wider political mobilization. And yet, the
unprecedent labor unrest of August-September 2020 happened in the unfavorable
environment of increasing work precarity, mounting state repression and weak labor
organizations. What could account for the resources that enabled workers to rebel?

2. Creating cleavage, overcoming atomization

During the protests, Belarusian workers had to overcome the challenges of their
suppressed voice, bureaucratic despotism, and atomization. I hypothesize that it was
the often-criticized shallowness of the Belarusian opposition’s ideology and workers’
participation in the broader protest movement that made the labor unrest possible.

The prevalence of a vague populist anti-authoritarian rhetoric in the general protest

helped workers overcome the suppression of their voice in the workplaces. Virtually all
demands voiced during the labor unrest had been “political”: from mild appeals to
prosecute cases of police violence to calls for Lukashenka’s resignation. In second place,
however, in several cases there have been economic demands related to low wages and
poor working conditions. This populist ideological framing, which stems from the “non-
parasites protests” of 2017 14 and was picked up by the opposition presidential

11
David Mandel, Perestroika and the Soviet People: Rebirth of the Labor Movement (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991); Donald A Filtzer,
Soviet Workers and the Collapse of Perestroika: The Soviet Labor Process and Gorbachev’s Reforms, 1985-1991 (Cambridge University
Press, 1994).
12
Valier Bulhakau and Andrey Dynko, eds., Khryshchennie natsyi. Massavyia aktsyi 1988-2009 (Vilnius, Belastok, Minsk: Bielaruskaye
histarychnaye tavarystva; Instytut belarusistyki; Palitychnaya sfera, 2011).
13
Tatsiana Chyzova, “Rabochy pratest u Bielarusi (2011-2013 hh.). Chastka piershaya,” Prasvet, 2013, http://prasvet.com/1547.
14
Volodymyr Artiukh, “The People against State Populism. Belarusian Protests against the ‘Social Parasite Law,’” Schweizerisches Archiv
für Volkskunde 116, no. 1 (2020): 101–16.

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campaign15, has encouraged workers to formulate their demands, bypassing the apathy
instilled in them by previous futile efforts to appeal to the official unions with purely
economic claims.

Moreover, even a conventional strike over work-related grievances deemed “legitimate”

by Belarusian Labor Law is already utopian: it involves a lengthy procedure which
involves consent from two-thirds of a representative workers' congress with a two
week warning; it may be prohibited for national security, public order, and other
reasons. Moreover, strikes legally initiated by trade unions cannot include “political
demands”, as the Belarusian Law on Trade Unions states without further clarification.

The anti-authoritarian appropriation of the populist “thin ideology” created a situation

of cleavage16 between “us” *the “working people”( and “them” *the “corrupt bosses”).
This proved essential in overcoming the factory regime of bureaucratic despotism, since
in the state capitalist country that is Belarus, class conflict is blurred: the immediate
exploiter coincides with the state bureaucracy, and there cannot be social demands that
are disconnected from political demands. In popular perception bureaucrats do not
appear as the managers of state-owned capital that they are, they are seen instead as
part of a feudal order; their social control function is abstracted and fetishized by the
workers, and their exploitative function is left aside. Thus, workers’ protest proved
most successful not as a struggle against exploiters but as a rebellion against both
company and state bureaucracy.

The initial success in forcing the management and the local authorities into a dialogue in
the first week of labor unrest encouraged workers to continue pressing their demands
and start uniting in organized ways. However, disaffected by the state-controlled trade
unions and lacking knowledge about other labor organizations, workers did not know
how to protest in their capacity as workers. As evidenced by the Minsk Tractor Factory
Telegram channel, workers did not know what a strike means precisely, they could not
agree on the time and date of a gathering or on how to proceed afterwards. Similarly to
an idiosyncratic use of the work “strike,” which colloquially referred to any protest

15
Volodymyr Artiukh, “More Contagious than Coronavirus: Electoral Unrest under Lukashenka’s Tired Rule in Belarus,” Open Democracy,
August 2020, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/electoral-unrest-under-lukashenkas-tired-rule-in-belarus/.
16
Varga, Worker Protests in Post-Communist Romania and Ukraine: Striking with Tied Hands.

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action, the word “strike committee” (stachkom17) was initially used to denote one
person (in the case of the Minsk Tractor Factory, Siarhei Dyleuski).

Therefore, Belarusian workers had to rely on other means to overcome atomization.

Although we talk about this labor unrest as a part of the larger protest, Belarusian
working class protested as citizens rather than as workers. This is proven by the fact
that the labor protest wave immediately followed the post-electoral general
mobilization with its outrage against police violence and that the spikes of labor
militancy have been related to the broader weekly protest schedule. Additionally,
BCDTU-affiliated trade unions have a long-standing tradition of participating in
opposition protests, which they brought to the newly organizing strike committees. This
is, however, an ambivalent process: the very experience of uniting and standing up to
the bosses is vitally necessary for the workers to overcome atomization and gain
organizational experience, but at the same time workers have not learned to articulate
political demands with a broader social agenda. At this stage in the development of the
Belarusian working class, the form of their activity proved more important than the
content.

Concluding remarks

The resurgence of labor militancy in Belarus seems to have chances in the long-term
perspective rather than in conjunction with the struggle of the broader opposition
movement. The politicization that workers brought to their factories from the streets,
their experience of standing up to their bosses, the experience of solidarity and self-
organization will probably not disappear without traces. A large share of the workers at
all major enterprises went through this moment of politicization, of realizing their
collectivity and opposition to their bosses. Work safety-related and economic issues are
increasingly added to the purely political agenda of the protests.

This first protest drive has been harshly repressed, but the contradictions of Belarusian
state capitalism will not go away, they will only become more acute. Not only the global
recession, but also the pressure from Russian capital will affect the Belarusian working
class. On the one hand, it will increase the precariousness of workers’ situation: wages
will go down, enterprises will be slowly sold off to Russian capitalists, “optimized,” or
closed. On the other hand, bureaucratic control over workplaces will also increase, and
17
Probably a case of folk etymology by analogy with voenkom (military commissar).

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the state-affiliated trade unions will not be capable of channelling workers’ discontent.
This combination of workers’ newly gained politicization and organization experience
combined with the deteriorating economic situation may lead to new waves of labor
unrest, maybe more autonomous from larger political protests.

However, the immediate politicization of the labor movement, which accounted for this
unprecedented wave of militancy at Belarusian enterprises, is both a blessing and a
curse. Although I showed how it helped overcome the lack of organizational resources,
it makes the labor movement dependent on external factors. Even in 1991, during the
April strike, the labor movement had a political representation in parliament, but now,
despite having reached a comparable scale, it lacks such political representation.
Moreover, workers’ economic interests are not articulated in the general opposition
platform. Thus developing autonomous labor organizations on the basis of
representative trade unions and strike committees becomes vital. Otherwise, Belarusian
labor risks repeating the sorry fate of many other pro-democracy mobilizations 18.

18
David Ost, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Cornell University Press, 2005).