The paper is devoted to the economic and legal aspects of environmental safety in modern conditions. It is proved that there are the necessary initial data and rationalizing materials for the introduction in accordance with the established procedure of the normative indicators of the lower threshold of environmental safety. It has been established that in the economically developed countries considerable experience in recycling household waste has been accumulated. It is determined that there are all grounds to assert that, at the present level of development of science and technology, it is technologically possible to ensure environmental safety through the rational use of natural resources, the introduction of wasteless complexes, resource and energy-saving facilities. Practice has shown that in the legislation of the Russian Federation the issues of rational use of natural resources are poorly reflected. These issues were studied in detail in the governmental plans, which in the previous period had the status of laws.
This paper aims to explain the characteristics and internal mechanisms of protest activity and solidarity among Russia’s industrial workers over the past two decades. Both academic discussions and officials’ attitudes toward protests prove contradictory. Even in periods of increase, labor activism has remained limited. Yet authorities continue to show concern about real and potential discontent, while academics puzzle over the dominance of quiescence as well as the reasons for sporadic activism. The research presented in this article advances our understanding of both: the limits of protest, and the causes, forms and goals of Russian labor’s periodic collective activism. We rely on a combination of available statistical and recent survey data to try to resolve the paradoxes of labor’s quiescence and conflict, as well as elites’ neglect and concern.
The research finds changes in patterns of labor activism over the two decades. During the 1990s, most strikes were limited, defensive, managed, or desperate in character. In Russia’s recovered economy, from 2006 a qualitatively different, “classical” pattern of strikes and labor relations emerged. Workers’ collective actions mainly affected large, profitable industrial and transnational enterprises and took the form of “normalized” bargaining and conflict between labor and management. With the 2008–09 recession workers returned to the defensive strategies of the 1990s, protesting wage cuts and factory closures. Survey research from 2010 shows workers to be almost evenly divided between groups with positive and negative attitudes toward solidarity and bargaining.
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