Spaceport workers send an SOS to Putin

Workers at the Vostochny Cosmodrome, a spaceport currently under construction in the Russian Far East, have appealed directly to Vladimir Putin in a series of messages painted on the roofs of several buildings.

The messages are from employees of the Pacific Bridge-building Company, who haven’t received their wages for the past four months. Labor organizers say they hope journalists will photograph the rooftop messages when they visit the compound with Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who is overseeing construction.

Before journalists arrived, construction workers photographed the messages themselves from a crane. Workers say they already mailed Putin a letter through the traditional channels, but the Kremlin’s office referred them to local labor inspectors.

The Pacific Bridge-building Company is one of the world’s largest subcontractors in the construction of cosmodromes. The total unpaid wages at the Vostochny Cosmodrome are estimated to be roughly 60 million rubles ($1.17 million). Local police have launched a criminal investigation into the wage arrears. 

“Rogozin always has lots of journalists with him, and it’s not as if they’re forbidden from printing these images [of the rooftop messages]. Somebody somewhere will do it. It will be a signal. We want to attract the President’s attention to what is going on at the Cosmodrome. They say a lot, but very little has been done,” said Anton Tyurishev, a construction site boss from the Pacific Bridge-building Company.

In March, workers at the Vostochny Cosmodrome from a different subcontractor, Stroiindustriya-S, also staged a protest against wage arrears. Federal investigators launched a probe, finding that the company had failed to pay employees a total of 14 million rubles ($273,000). Sergey Terentyev, the company’s CEO, is now in jail.

On April 8, the local district attorney’s office announced that construction companies had paid off 9 million rubles ($175,000) in wage arrears that had accumulated for more than 200 workers since the beginning of 2015.