4. The wage scale regulations for individual groups of the workers and for certain branches of industry or parts thereof, must contain provisions either for the shortening of hours, or for the increase of pay as compensation for particularly harmful, dangerous, difficult or exhaustive labor, and in connection with climatic conditions.
5. Clothing and footwear is to be distributed to the workers engaged in the wood chopping industry, the sewerage and street cleaning industry, or occupied in underground work, work at a particularly high temperature, or necessitating the handling of harmful chemicals. Particularly difficult and harmful work (such as, underground work, the peat gathering industry, the preparation of wood fuel, work at a high temperature, work with poisonous gases and acids exhausting the system) should carry with it a home and a higher wage. This latter measure is to be carried out by the All-Russian and local councils of the Vocational Unions. In order to put these additions and amendments to the wage scale regulations into actual life and in order to do away with the obnoxious multiformity the Congress resolves:
To recognize the wage scale regulation which is being carried out on a national scale and which affects all the workers and employees of a given industry, from the highest administrator down to the skilled laborer,—as the one which best answers the fundamental needs of standardizing the wages.
To grant to the All-Russian Central Committee of the Industrial Unions the exclusive right to finally work out the wage scale regulations and to submit them for approval of the All-Russian Central Council of Professional Unions and to the People’s Commissariat of Labor.
To deprive the local branches of the All-Russian centralized unions of the right to directly submit their wage scale for approval over the head of their central body, so long as an All-Russian industrial wage scale is in operation.
To leave to the local Soviets (councils) of the Vocational Unions the right to fix the wage scale regulations only for the local unions, which have no All-Russian association, using the wage scale regulations in force as a guide; under no circumstances changing the regulations passed on a national scale. Besides, it is the duty of the local Soviets of the Vocational Unions to coordinate individual scales in different industries while putting them into practice, and the right to present a grounded petition for the transfer of a given locality into another district in accordance with the proportional (percentage) scale of district decrease of wages.
The Congress approves of the work of the committee and the section on the construction of wage scale regulations and recommends to the All-Russian centralized industrial unions to accept them as a basis. The Congress authorizes the All-Russian Central Council of Vocational Unions to carry out this resolution strictly and without any deviations.
LABOR SAFEGUARDS AND SOCIAL INSURANCE
OF THE WORKERS
(Resolution passed in connection with A. Bakhutov’s report)