St. Petersburg Workers and Implementation of the Social Insurance Law of 1912

Abstract

On June 23, 1912, the Russian Duma passed a “Law on Sickness Insurance.” The law provided for kassy or benefit funds from worker and employer contributions managed by a board including worker representatives. Councils set up by the government, which included workers, would administer the law. Implemented first in St. Petersburg, the law provided for the election of representatives from eight metalworking factories, who would work with employers to draw up model rules. Afterwards, the law would be extended, industry-by-industry, to other factories covered by the law. The adoption and implementation of this law in Russia, a country described by modern historians and contemporary revolutionaries as politically and economically “backward,” indicates that the tsarist bureaucracy, business elites, and worker activists had begun to develop a dialogue that had the potential to produce progressive change in late Imperial Russia. The tsarist government acted to protect child and female workers and provided factory inspectors and even worker representation in a series of reforms that addressed the problems specific to labor in a modernizing industrial state.