Olympic Workers Unpaid For Months

MOSCOW — Hundreds of workers at an Olimpstroi-funded construction site in Sochi have not been paid in months, with some complaining that they are going hungry after giving up their passports as collateral to get food at grocery stores.

The scandal is the latest to hit Russia’s $13 billion effort to ready the Black Sea resort for the 2014 Winter Olympics. Residents displaced by construction for the games have complained that they are not being adequately compensated, while environmental activists say the work is blighting the region.

About 180 people were not working Friday, exasperated by months without pay and desperate for food, said Sergei Dykhalov, who was hired by general contractor Moskonversprom as the site’s crane operator for 36,000 rubles ($1,200) a month.

He said he hadn’t received his salary since December.

“People believed them. We thought it’s an Olympic project, controlled by the government. I thought it would be the pride of Russia. Instead, they have sent us like slaves into a mine,” Dykhalov told The St. Petersburg Times.

In July, Moskonversprom won an Olimpstroi tender to build 166 houses for residents in the Imeretinskaya valley. The company’s winning offer was 20 percent below the maximum bid price of 872.8 million rubles ($30 million), according to the Olimpstroi web site.

Work was to begin immediately and be finished by May 2010.

All sides agree that the project is now behind schedule, but the consensus ends there. Moskonversprom blames its subcontractors for the working conditions and delayed wages, but the subcontractors say they have not been paid. Workers for both the general contractor and one of the subcontractors told The Moscow Times by phone that they were not being paid.

Dykhalov said he could not return to his mountain village in North Ossetia because debt collectors are waiting for him to pay back a bank loan.

“I will not work until they pay me, and then I will quit, never to work here again,” he said.

In the meantime, he said, they cannot hire another crane operator because the machinery is signed out under his name.

Wage arrears shot up in Russia as the economy collapsed in late 2008, particularly at stalled construction sites and the industrial plants that supply them. Wage arrears rose to 4.1 billion rubles in January, or by 15.5 percent compared with a month earlier, according to the latest figures from the State Statistics Service.

If a company has funds and willfully does not pay salaries, its executives can be punished by up to two years in prison, according to Article 145.1 of the Criminal Code. Employers are required to prioritize salary payments ahead of other expenses if they have unpaid wages.

Solnechny Dom, a subcontractor on the project, said Moskonversprom owed about 5 million rubles ($171,000), making it impossible for them to pay salaries.

“I have not had a single day off for three months and have not seen a single ruble,” said Arnold Yeprikyan, a foreman with Solnechny Dom, whose 168 workers on the project were building 19 houses. The firm, based in the Krasnodar region town of Tuapse, was last paid an advance in December and has finished its project, he said.

“There are about 80 of our people still here, the rest gave up and left for home or to other jobs,” Yeprikyan said.

He estimated that as many as 400 workers at the site were not being paid.

“We saw Putin and Medvedev say on TV that people eat well at construction sites in Sochi. What they give us is not human food, and they charge us 200 rubles a day for it,” Yeprikyan said.

He sent a short video clip from his cell phone to web site Blogsochi.ru, which shows the area where 240 of the workers are housed. They live in 40 mobile housing units with six bunks in each, overflowing portable toilets, and an army tent that houses a kitchen.

The only shower is closed, the video shows.

Moskonversprom chief executive Valery Morozov told The St. Petersburg Times that Solnechny Dom provided faulty work and was responsible for the poor staff housing. The people who are protesting are no longer employed, and the work has not been disrupted, he said.

Workers said journalists have been barred from the guarded site.

“There are certain firms connected with bandits that gained access to Olympic construction projects,” he said, adding that several such companies were among his subcontractors.

Solnechny Dom should have finished all the work before New Year but took too long to hire enough workers and made mistakes during construction that the next subcontractor has to correct, Morozov said.