The Workers

The workers here get paid when their management wants to pay them. Seems to be common in Russia. If they stop working, they are out of a job. So they just keep working until someone takes pity on them and pays their salaries.

Meeting at the project. Not really a meeting, more like a communist Duma assembly. Seven guys sit in front with television monitors, facing the audience sitting in theater seats. The major players make their presentations in Powerpoint on a big flatscreen, followed by tough questions and discussions. Mainly questions like "are you on schedule", "why not", "will you finish on time". The answers are always yes, no one admits failure here until just before the execution. This time the question was "who here is not paying their workers". A few embarrassed hands went up. Its been a known fact for some time. The way contracts are awarded here is to award a month's worth of work, after which the contractor calculates how much material he needs, then submits a request for advanced payment. When the month is over, he applies for payment for actual work performed, using Russian Standard prices. The advance is taken and who knows where it goes. Not to the workers, and apparently not to the suppliers. Someone's getting the money. Who? Anyway, this time the client threatened to call the media if these workers weren't paid "today". So that night the grocery store next to our apartment was packed beyond belief. The workers finally got paid.