OREANDA-NEWS. About 600 employees of AvtoVAZ attended in a meeting in Togliatti, by protesting against cuts and low wages in the enterprise. The chairman of the regional organization of inter-regional trade union "Working association", Peter Zolotarev, informed about it the agency “TASS”.

"The two main aims of this meeting - are to stop the reduction of AvtoVAZ and to increase the salary of employees. We also call for the beginning of collective dispute procedure, which should lead eventually to negotiations with the management of the plant, otherwise it is possible to strike", - he said.

The participants came to the meeting with a red flag with the inscription: "Strike" and homemade signs: "No cuts!", "We demand the indexation of salaries and pensions", "Down with optimization", "Hands off AvtoVAZ", "Komsomol is building VAZ. Boo (referring to the president of Boo Anderson), do not dare to decide for us”.

"To start the procedure of collective dispute, we must collect the signatures of more than half of employees in the company, that is, more than 30 thousand people. Then the management will be obliged by law to sit with us at the negotiating table”, - says Mr.Zolotarev. According to him, today labor unions are searching for active, indifferent employees who will soon begin to collect signatures for the beginning of a collective labor dispute. All voiced recently proposals by management of AvtoVAZ should be established by documents.

On October 31st in Tolyatti it was already held a meeting, at which workers of AvtoVAZ demanded to finish the reduction of staff and consider increasing salaries. At the end of October, the average salary was about 28 thousand rubles. According to the results of the meeting in October the labor union "Unity" appealed to the leadership of AvtoVAZ with the proposal to make at the meeting to discuss the requirements, but the talks did not take place.

As stated at the end of October at a meeting with workers of the plant the President of AvtoVAZ, Bo Andersson, it is not planned staff cuts in 2015. "We do not plan to cut people in 2015. But we plan to continue the transfer of staff between departments. And the most importantly - we must raise our productivity by 10-15%”, - said Bo Andersson. 

On December 12th the head of AvtoVAZ at the conference of the personnel stated that all plant employees will receive the award at the end of 2014 for successful work over the quality of cars, it was allocated 290 million Rubles on the payment of bonuses. On January 1st, the plant will begin a phased transfer from the tariff system of remuneration to the system of salaries. Salary will be reviewed once a year upwards.

Overall budget of AvtoVAZ to finance social benefits and guarantees in 2014 increased compared to the previous year by 22% to 2.2 billion Rubles. A similar amount is laid on the fulfillment of social obligations of AvtoVAZ in 2015.