A Kwakwani source has sent us a report that RUSAL’s Russian Managers are looking around for another location at which to entertain themselves. The Club for senior managers – mostly Russians, of course – was destroyed by fire recently. No word on how the fire started but we are told that the General Manager and another Russian boss were hanging out there in beach wear when the conflagration occurred; too much vodka in the Club, perhaps? No fatalities or injuries, we are told but apparently the Clubhouse was totaled.
From all that we have read about the Russians these guys are capable of knocking back quite a bit of vodka. There’s the down market brands for the proletariat and the top shelf brands for the RUSAL boys…..brands like Belugo and Kauffman and Stolichnaya and Vinigradova and Moskovskya. Those are the ones that apparently get sent down here for them.
Russians are great vodka drinkers. They reportedly consume around 4.75 gallons of the stuff per person annually which, we are told, is more than double the 2.3 gallons which the World Health Organization considers a health threat; must be the cold weather over there. It’s a ding dong tussle between the lawmakers Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Putin to get the people to favour milk over vodka and the lobbyists for the various brands. Some time ago a New York Times article quoted a Dr. Aleksandr Nemtsov, reportedly one of Russia’s leading experts on alcohol as saying that “the government does not want to deprive poor people of cheap vodka because it is better for them when people are drunk,” an assertion which he reportedly attributed to Catherine The Great.
If the RUSAL boys at KK don’t have the excuse of cold weather they can perhaps tender the warm time they are having with the bauxite workers there as a fairly good reason for any indulgences. We are told that the Russians run a pretty tight ship at KK; apparently the manner in which they interpret our local industrial relations rules has to do with not being able to read English too well. It seems that when translated into Russian the phrase respect for workers rights is sometimes interpreted to mean anything ranging from threatening recalcitrant workers with violence to de-recognizing their union for raising its voice in protest. Mind you, one has to wonder whether RUSAL’s junior partner, the Government of Guyana, is any more proficient in its understanding of workers’ rights since the workers at KK say that it seems that the Russians can do just about anything and get away with it.
