Russian trade unions complain: They interfere with protests against raising the retirement age
Russian trade unions are planning a series of protests against the so-called pension reform, which increases the retirement age starting in 2019. Boris Kravchenko, president of the All-Russian Trade Union Association "Confederation of Labor of Russia" and a member of the Presidential Council on Human Rights, announced this at a press conference in Moscow, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
According to him, at the same time, local authorities are countering such actions - they are banned and marginalized.
“We are at the stage of filing applications for collective action in the regions. We see different entities submitting these applications. Currently, we have information about more than 50 applications submitted in different regions of Russia. I can name some of them - Krasnoyarsk, Barnaul, Chelyabinsk, Pskov, Irkutsk, Ulyanov, Chita, Saratov, Yaroslavl, Novosibirsk, Astrakhan, St. Petersburg, Novokuznetsk, Smolensk, Tomsk and other cities. Of the 50 applications, four have currently been approved; a number of applications have been rejected. In Pskov, in the park where the regional confederation of trade unions planned to hold the action, the authorities agreed on an alternative action: “For a dignified old age.” We see that there is a strategy of the authorities to marginalize and limit shares,” Kravchenko said.
Let us remind you that the Russian government previously approved a bill according to which the retirement age is raised to 65 years for men and to 63 years for women.