OREANDA-NEWS. August 12, 2008. The social security and personnel management executives of Rosenergoatom Concern and the chairmen of the primary trade unions of the REA nuclear power plants attended the meeting.

The chairman of the trade union of Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant Alexander Zaycev says that the conferees are supposed to discuss the results of the implementation of the corporate agreement 2007 and the future of the agreement now that Rosenergoatom Concern has been reorganized from federal state unitary enterprises into open joint stock company.

The key topic of the meeting was the new remuneration system of Rosenergoatom Concern. If approved, this system will be launched on Jan 1 2009. The new system is supposed to defend the interests of the Concern’s employees under new legal and organizational structure. Zaytsev believes that priority should be given to the interests of the Concern, as a whole. Particularly, Rosenergoatom Concern should guarantee the safety and efficiency of its nuclear power plants, should pay worthy wages to its employees and should provide both current and former employees with a large package of social benefits.

As regards the wages, Zaytsev says that, for example, the salary of a fitter of the highest class must not be higher than the salary of his supervisor. Otherwise, everybody will seek to become a fitter and nobody — a supervisor – and this will hurt the interests of the whole company. Likewise, the salary of a highly qualified worker must not be higher than the salary of an engineer or nobody will want to study for five years to become an engineer. Unreasonable remuneration may result in loss of qualified personnel. “We must also keep balance between different departments: a reactor operator will hardly be happy if he knows that his colleague driver or bookkeeper is paid more than he is,” says Zaytev.

If approved, the new remuneration system will be the third system in the last six years. “We suggested revising the system as long as four years ago. Since we believe that the basic principle of an effective remuneration system must be balance of interests, we suggest that this principle be applied not only to different professional categories and departments but to nuclear power plants. Our nuclear power plants have different types of reactors with different capacities and service lives. These factors must also be considered. When four years ago we urged our colleagues to work out a new remuneration system many of them refused to understand us and advised us not to make fuss. “The current system is good!” they said. But now everybody has seen that we need revisions.”