Date: Tue, 5 Mar 1996 11:34:23 -0600 (CST)
From: Chegitz Guevara <mluziett-AT-shrike.depaul.edu>
Subject: Ukranian Miners Stage Massive Strike/GreenLeft (fwd)



Marc, "the Chegitz," Luzietti
personal homepage: http://shrike.depaul.edu/~mluziett
political homepage: http://shrike.depaul.edu/~mluziett/chegitz.html
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Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
from Green Left Weekly #222 3/6/96

Ukrainian miners stage massive strike

By Renfrey Clarke

MOSCOW - Coal miners in Ukraine returned to work on February 16 after one
of the hardest-fought strikes in the former Soviet republic in recent
years. The resumption of work followed an agreement by the government to
negotiate with the miners on their demand for the payment of wages owing
since October, and after an initial pay-out offer had been substantially
increased.

The government continued to resist miners' demands for major new
investment to revive the country's decaying, accident-prone coal industry.
In this, the authorities took their cue from the International Monetary
Fund, whose negotiators were holding talks with government officials while
the strike was at its height. Along with the World Bank, the IMF favours
widespread mine closures in Ukraine.

The miners have had to mount repeated struggles to force the government to
sign over money to pay their wages, now reduced by inflation to the
equivalent of US$50-75 a month. A coal stoppage in 1993 forced then
President Leonid Kravchuk to call an early election, which he lost. A
further strike in December 1994 ended with the government agreeing to pay
US$270 million in wage arrears.

During 1995 the government drastically reduced its subsidies to
loss-making mines and drew up plans to close 38 pits employing 40,000
miners. Economists pointed out that the cost to the state of supporting
large numbers of jobless miners would make it cheaper to keep the mines
open.

In the event, all of Ukraine's 250 or so coal mines have continued to
operate. But as the government tries to meet insistent IMF demands for
reductions in the state budget deficit, miners' wages have fallen
repeatedly under the cost-cutters' axe.

By late January, the coal unions put the total unpaid wage bill at the
equivalent of US$122 million. Some disability payments to injured miners
had not been paid since July.

Broad scope

The strike began on February 1. On the morning of February 2, a total of
142 mines, accounting for more than 70% of industry output, were reported
to have shut down entirely. At almost all the remaining mines, workers
were refusing to load coal for shipment. Trade union sources put the
number of miners and other coal industry employees on strike as high as
800,000.

The stoppage affected pits not just in the traditionally militant, mainly
Russian-speaking Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, but also the mines of
Lviv province in the Ukrainian-speaking west. On February 1 protest
meetings in the Lviv province coalfields drew a reported 15,000
participants.

On February 5, with the strike solid, some 1000 delegates from mines
throughout Ukraine gathered in the Donbass centre of Donetsk and announced
that the stoppage would continue until the government joined talks on
settling the conflict. As well as payment of wages owed, the miners were
demanding that the government pledge the equivalent of US$1.5 billion in
subsidies in order to renovate the industry.

The strikers had caught the government at a vulnerable moment. Ukraine
during the first half of February was in the grip of the most sustained
period of intensely cold weather in half a century. Electricity
production, dependent largely on accident-prone nuclear plants and imports
of Russian oil and gas, was on the brink of collapse. If coal-fired
generating plants were forced to cease operating for lack of fuel,
widespread industrial shutdowns were inevitable - and the cost to
government revenues could easily exceed that of meeting the miners' pay
claims.

Accordingly, the government's offers to the miners began to creep upward.
Initially, deputy prime minister Vasyl Yevtukhov told parliament that the
equivalent of US$21 million had been allocated for paying miners' wages.
Ministers stated that additional funds would have to come from outside the
budget. Coal industry customers, including coking plants and electricity
generating plants, are said by the government to owe the mines a total of
US$320 million.

As the energy situation grew more critical, the government's financial
possibilities seemed mysteriously to increase. On February 8, as 5000
miners demonstrated in Donetsk, Prime Minister Yevhen Marchuk was quoted
as saying that the miners would get no more than the sum - put by him at
the equivalent of US$79 million - already pledged. This, however, was
still less than two-thirds of the sum the miners were demanding as a
minimum.

Blackouts

A few days later, the feared energy crunch arrived. On February 12 the
Russian government cut off electricity sales after the frequency of the
current in the Ukrainian network fell to critical levels. Extended
blackouts followed in most areas of Ukraine. In the industrial centre of
Dnipropetrovsk, electricity supplies were cut by 40%, forcing the closure
of most plants.

By this time, threats and promises from the government had eroded the
strike to the point where the miners were no longer capable of forcing a
decisive victory. On February 13 union sources reported that 40 mines
remained fully shut down, with workers in another 87 refusing to load
coal.

The government's options were limited by an extensive solidarity movement.
On February 14 it was reported that the Coordinating Council of Trade
Unions of the Machine Building and Defence Complex, and the Association of
Trade Unions of Basic Industrial Sectors, had called for an all- Ukrainian
protest action on February 21. This was to include a general one-hour
stoppage, around demands that included meeting the miners' claims.

Nevertheless, the miners were forced to drop their call for massive state
support to the coal industry, and to limit their demands to the payment of
wage arrears. On February 16, with 25 mines still fully on strike, the
miners' leaders announced that they had decided to suspend the stoppage
and take up a government offer of talks.

Uncertain future

The miners' movement has emerged from another hard-fought conflict with
its militant traditions and popular backing recharged. For the government
and the IMF, eager for the implementation of a long list of anti-worker
policies, the combativity in the mining centres presents an obstacle that
will not be easily overcome. But the steady collapse of the Ukrainian coal
industry places a question mark over the miners' longer-term prospects.

The output of Ukraine's coal mines fell by a further 11% in 1995, to a
figure less than half that of 1990. Once a leading centre of the Soviet
coal industry, Ukraine is now a coal importer.

The refusal of the government to invest in the coal industry has made work
in the mines mortally hazardous. On February 18, three miners in the
Donetsk region drowned when a cage was lowered into a shaft that had
filled unexpectedly with water. The miners' deaths brought the number of
fatalities in the Ukrainian mines this year to 43. Even as output has
plunged, the death toll has risen.

                             -30-

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