Female Student Denied Right to Drive Metro Trains

Russia’s High Court last week rejected the civil case of St. Petersburg student Anna Klevets who demanded the right for women to work as metro locomotive drivers or assistants for the drivers.

The reasons for the decision were not announced, but a government representative in court insisted on the wisdom of such restrictions and their adherence to the International Labor Organization Convention.

Government representatives said such restrictions were the result of attitudes to women in society, Interfax reported.

Yelena Pleshko, head of the legal department at Peterburgskaya Egida, the rights organization that represents Klevets’ interests, said on Thursday that they hadn’t seen the court’s final decision yet and therefore did not know the reasons for the decision.

“As soon as we get that decision, we’ll decide whether we should appeal to the Court of Cassation,” Pleshko said.

Klevets, 22, a fifth year law student, appealed to the court at the end of 2008 after she failed to get a job as an assistant to a metro locomotive driver.

Klevets had decided to work in the metro because she could not find a vacancy in her area of expertise, Pleshko said.

“Klevets comes from a different city, and she had financial difficulties like many students, especially in the situation of the financial crisis,” Pleshko said. “Therefore she first tried to find a law job before her graduation, but failed. Then she saw information about well-paid jobs as metro locomotive drivers, and decided to go for it. However, she was refused on the grounds that women are not allowed to do this work,” she said.

“Klevets was struck by the unfairness of the situation in which there were vacancies, but only for men,” Pleshko said.

Klevets considered the restriction on women working in metro locomotives as gender discrimination that contravenes legislation.

The student also appealed to St. Petersburg’s Leninsky district court with a request for 100,000 ($2,800) rubles for moral damage and the salary that she could have received for working as a metro locomotive driver, Pleshko said.

Women were banned from working as metro locomotive drivers in Russia in 2000. Previously, many women had worked as metro locomotive drivers both in Moscow and Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was formerly known, and were highly respected for doing so.

Article 253 of the Russian Labor Code says that female workers should not perform “hard physical jobs and jobs with harmful or dangerous labor conditions, or work underground except in non-physical jobs or sanitary and consumer services.”

The list of forbidden jobs includes 456 professions, including diver, gas rescue worker, paratrooper and fireman.

“At the same time we see that women are allowed to work with tuberculosis patients or as metal workers,” Pleshko said.

Pleshko said that her organization had recently received calls from two more young women willing to work as metro locomotive drivers.

“One of them had dreamed of working as a metro locomotive driver since she was seven years old,” she said.

Klevets could not be reached for comment.

Yulia Shavel, spokeswoman for the St. Petersburg metro, said the city’s metro has a neutral position in regard to Klevets’ case.

“We are not against women as metro drivers but we can’t accept them for those positions since it’s against the law,” Shavel said. “Besides, if women want to do it, they should have serious medical approval to do so,” she said.

“If women want to do that job, they need to know that this profession requires instant, innate reactions to non-standard situations. In the event of those situations, they would need to take the right decision, and quickly,” Shavel said.

Shavel said the difference between women working as tram drivers is that those workers work above ground and that other services can come to their assistance, whereas underground it is not as easy, especially if there is a fire.

Meanwhile, Natalya Donskaya, a retired metro locomotive driver, said the job of a locomotive driver is rather difficult for women.

“I wouldn’t wish this job on other women,” she said. “It requires the complete sacrifice of your personal life. Everything has to be dedicated to this job, and one must have excellent health to do it,” Donskaya said, Russia’s Channel One television reported.