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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (164448)	7/25/2001 4:04:08 PM
From: goldworldnet	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 769670

Doctors Offended by Offer of Dung By Kevin O'Flynn Staff Writer JF thought you might find this amusing TheMoscowTimes.com Tuesday, May. 15, 2001. Page 1 Dr. Yury Zotov is used to being paid very little. He is used to being paid months late. He is even used to being paid in goods, but something inside of him broke when the hospital where he works offered him three tons of manure instead of back wages. "I'm a surgeon, what do I need with manure?" Zotov, 42, said in a telephone interview from the Vacha district hospital in the Nizhny Novogorod region. "It's an insult." Zotov and the rest of the few hundred people who work at the hospital were offered the dung as part-payment for wages not paid from December. For years in Russia, bosses with no cash have used anything at hand to pay their staff. If a company produces something, then its products are the most likely choice. The Podolsk sewing-machine company once gave its workers sewing machines, while the Massandra vineyard in the Crimea once gave 10 bottles of wine a month. These bottles could in turn be exchanged for food. Much weirder payments have occurred when firms have passed out goods that they have received from other firms in lieu of debt, for instance the packets of tampons that were given to Arkhangelsk lumberjacks in 1994. Zotov, who has worked as a surgeon at the hospital for 18 years, also has taken home some unusual things, including building materials. But there was a limit to what he would accept. And the back-end product of a farm animal was it. As Henry Miller once said, "When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes." "If they'd offered us sugar or sand, maybe we'd have kept quiet," Zotov said. "But manure?" He made the hospital staff's plight known in Moscow by appearing on TV Center. Delays in the provincial hospital's miserly wages have been frequent, according to Zotov, whose salary of just a little more than 1,300 rubles a month ($45) is one of the best in the hospital. Some doctors receive as little as 700 rubles, nurses as little as 500 rubles and cleaning staff 250 rubles, he said. "I don't know how to feed my children," said Zotov, whose wife, also a doctor, earns 840 rubles a month at the hospital. "We work day and night." In addition to the insult of the offer, Zotov already has all the manure he needs from his own livestock. So flabbergasted was he that he didn't even stop to find out what kind of dung was his for the taking. "I don't know what type, maybe it's their own," joked Zotov, who said the offer came from the mayor via the chief doctor at the hospital. Vacha Mayor Alexander Abrosimov defended the offer of manure. "Maybe the associations are not pleasant, but it's a needed commodity for every resident," the mayor said in a telephone interview. Many people survive on their low wages by growing vegetables in garden plots or at their dachas. "Everyone is looking for manure," the mayor said, adding that his administration was just trying to prevent people from becoming "anxious" about finding enough for their potatoes. He also poured scorn on Zotov's claims that he was poor. "He's not a poor man. ... He has his own house, a three-story house, a car," Abrosimov said. The mayor said Zotov was complaining because he was "psychologically sick." Lots of people who were "psychologically sick" were coming to his office to complain, he said. The dung, which Abrosimov said he thinks is from cows, is worth at least 350 rubles and perhaps as much as 500 rubles a truckload. A truckload makes up about three tons. Abrosimov blamed a shortfall in taxes for the inability to pay wages. The manure itself was received as payment from local collective farms who owed the city money for fuel for their tractors. themoscowtimes.com * * *