By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Ukrainian coal miners began returning to work on July 17 after 14 days of strikes and other protest actions that paralysed the country's coal-producing regions. The miners' key demand was that the government make money available to wipe out huge wage arrears. Some miners were still owed their pay from as much as four months back.
At the height of the struggle, strike leaders reported, more than 200,000 coal industry workers were taking part. Close to half of the country's 227 coal mines were shut down. In Donetsk, the main centre of the coal-producing Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, public transport was halted, and railways and major roads were blocked. Thousands of other unpaid workers, including teachers and health staff, joined the protests.
Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko admitted on July 10 that overdue wages in the country had reached the equivalent of US$1.4 billion. Of this, miners were said by their leaders to be owed some US$525 million.
Miners last forced the state to pay out wage arrears with a strike in February that brought the country's electricity grid to the verge of shutdown during the coldest winter for decades. Following those payments, the government again ceased meeting its financial obligations to the industry. Protests from miners were met with the argument that the reason wage bills were not being met was that mine managements were failing to collect debts from customers.
The miners' anger once again boiled over on July 3, when thousands in Donetsk province walked off the job and took part in mass protest meetings. More actions followed on July 8. On July 9 President Leonid Kuchma met with coal industry trade union leaders and administrative chiefs from the coal regions.
After these discussions, the union leaders did their best to dampen further struggles. Miners were urged not to halt production, but to wait for the government's promises to be carried out.
Protests spread
Led by enterprise strike committees, the miners expanded their protests. Large groups of workers halted railway traffic around Donetsk by lying across railroad tracks. Similar actions occurred in coal-producing towns in the Carpathian mountains in western Ukraine.
On July 10 Kuchma called for "an emergency regime in the economy", claiming that this was needed to ensure that wages were paid. First deputy prime minister Vasyl Durdinets was sent to Donetsk to confer with strike leaders. But according to Mikhail Krylov, co-chairperson of the Donetsk strike committee, Durdinets provided no satisfactory answers.
After the failure of these talks, the protest meetings and transport blockades reached new heights. The Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported on July 13 that sit-down strikes had spread to Lugansk province, also in eastern Ukraine. According to the report, the strike movement was "organised and ready to emerge onto the plane of political struggle". Another Moscow daily, Segodnya, quoted Krylov as saying that the miners were "becoming more and more aggressive".
The government decided that concessions were necessary if the miners' struggles were not to spread to much broader layers. "Money for the miners' needs has been found, and the tension will soon be eased", Prime Minister Lazarenko promised on July 12.
On July 16, with dozens of mines still on strike, the prime minister himself arrived in Donetsk. Under the deal worked out that day with union leaders, the government promised to pay all wage arrears by September 15, beginning with the full payment of June wages by July 20, and to make all future wage payments on time.
The two coal unions, the Ukrainian Union of Coal Industry Workers and the Donbass Independent Miners Union, received the right to oversee the payments process to ensure that money actually reached workers. The unions pledged to ensure an immediate resumption of work, and to cooperate with the government's plans to restructure the coal industry.
According to the news agency Interfax-Ukraine, the Donetsk strike committee condemned the settlement, arguing that its constituent groups had not empowered the unions to negotiate for them. The more radical miners are sceptical that the government will stick to the terms of the agreement. The latest deal repeats many features of the pact that ended the February strike wave.
Political action
The failure of the state to pay its debts is a central, if unadmitted, plank of government policy. Under pressure from international credit organisations, the authorities have pursued tight-money "stabilisation" strategies aimed at cutting inflation even at the cost of a dramatic shrinkage of the economy. To contain price rises, the government has relied heavily on not handing over the wage payments that, if spent, might raise price levels.
The government now boasts that monthly inflation in June was only 0.1%. But largely as a result of the collapse of domestic demand, official statistics show gross domestic product during the first five months of this year down by 9.1% on the same period of 1995. Output in the coal industry fell by 19.2%. Every third enterprise in Ukraine is now reportedly running at a loss. The suffering of the population has made any notion of stabilisation — a social and political category, not just an economic one — quite fantastic.
Among miners, there is a broad sentiment that the government's austerity policies need to be fought. There is also an understanding that the strike weapon, on its own, is of limited usefulness; many mines are loss-making, and the government only gains if their workers stop production. Organised political action is more and more seen as paramount.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta on July 13 quoted Viktor Turmanov, deputy chairperson of the Ukrainian Union of Coal Industry Workers, as mapping out the union's plans to organise "a social-political movement of miners". Union leaders foresee that this movement will be established before the end of August, and will "defend the rights of coal workers through political methods".
This defence will become real only if the workers make their own use of political methods, on a massive scale. The fact that union leaders endorse the concept of organised political action is not to be deplored. But the "Miners of Russia" movement set up by leaders of the main Russian miners' union has never amounted to much more than a nameplate on the door behind which union hierarchs and coal industry employers coordinate their plans for lobbying the government.
To be effective, a political movement of miners must be democratic, rooted in the workplaces and based on strategies of rank and file participation. The evidence so far suggests that serious political organising by Ukrainian miners will take place outside the union structures, not within them.