Work Without Wages: Russia's Non-Payment Crisis(Work Without Wages)

The 70-year-old Soviet tradition of "wages without work" soon turned into "work without wages" when the planned economy began switching to a market system in 1992. Lack of budget discipline, the breakdown of contractual obligations at all levels, and the failure of state agencies to enforce laws among businesses led to pervasive wage nonpayment to workers in both the public and private sectors. In this book Padma Desai and Todd Idson combine econometric rigour, policy analysis and empirical evidence to analyze wage nonpayment patterns across demographic groups defined by gender, age and education, and in various occupations, industries and regions of Russia. They also examine wage nonpayment to Russia's service personnel, in the wider context of a disintegrating military. Focusing on the roots and scale of wage nonpayment, the book is a useful guide to understanding Russia's economic restructuring and of the social costs of the transition born by the general population. Among the questions addressed are: How did Russia's factory managers decide who, among various categories of workers, would not get paid? Did wage denial push people below the poverty line? How did families survive when denied wages? Did strikes lead to reduced wage arrears? The authors describe a variety of survival strategies on the part of Russian families, including informal paid activity, the selling of family assets, home production for consumption and sale, and the receiving of cash from relatives.

About the Author :
Padma Desai is the Gladys and Roland Harriman Professor of Comparative Economic Systems and director of the Center for Transition Economies at Columbia University. A leading scholar of the Russian economy, she is the author of Conversations on Russia: Reform from Yeltsin to Putin, which was the Financial Times Pick of the Year in 2007, and coathor of Work Without Wages: Russia's Non-Payment Crisis (MIT Press). Her most recent book, on the current economic crisis, is From Financial Crisis to Global Recovery.

Review :
"The book is a significant contribution to the literature on the Japanese economy. There is no other book-length, English-language treatment of inequality in Japan."--Dale W. Jorgenson, Samuel W. Morris University Professor, Harvard University "Janos Kornai understands the way the socialist economy works better than anybody else in the world. His *Economics of Shortage* was for me and my associates in Russia a book of great importance. *By Force of Thought* offers a detailed look at how Kornai's life and thought developed."--Yegor Gaidar, Director, Institute for the Economy in Transition