After months without pay, workers in one of Ukraine’s largest coal mines had enough.
Workers at the Kholodna Balka mine in Donetsk Oblast’s Makeevka decided to strike on Jan. 13, bringing work to a halt, according to media reports.
In interviews with the Kyiv Post, miners said that they decided to go on strike after nearly a year-and-a-half without pay. According to three miners from Kholodna Balka, the last time that management had paid employees was September 2014.
A phone call to Kholodna Balka went unanswered.
Makeevugol, the state-owned enterprise that controls and operates the mine, also did not pick up the phone. The company’s website featured a Jan. 16 press release titled “Sabotage on mines is unacceptable” that appeared to address the incident.
In the statement, Makeevugol’s managers ask miners not to “succumb to the provocations of those who are interested in the destruction of the Donetsk People’s Republic, its industry, the loss of confidence in its leaders, its own future, and itself.”
The Kremlin-backed, self-proclaimed Energy and Mining Ministry replied to a request for comment by demanding a journalist accreditation number.
‘Slaves’
Posts on the Kholodna Balka mine’s page on the Russian social networking website VKontakte indicate that workers at the mine had grown steadily more agitated as the months without pay wore on.
One miner, Dmitriy Tokarev, had been complaining about the lack of pay on the VKontakte page for almost a year.
“Yes we’re fulfilling the work plan, but there’s no money!” Tokarev wrote.
Kholodna Balka miner Aleksandr Vishnevsky told the Kyiv Post that workers had not received regular payment since the war began, but that pay completely froze in September 2014.
Vishnevsky said he was injured in a September 2015 accident that left him partially buried under a slag heap and killed three others, but that he has not received any additional pay from the mine to help him recover from the injury.
Another worker at Kholodna Balka, Gleb Garaschenko, said that he had also not been paid since September 2014.
“We have the sense that we’re slaves here,” Garaschenko said in an interview with the Kyiv Post.
‘Almost the entire mine’
Multiple workers told the Kyiv Post that around 135 miners went on strike on Jan. 13.
“It was almost the entire mine,” Vishnevsky said.
According to Vishnevsky, after the protest began, Kholodna Balka management threatened the strikers that if they continued, they would be fired. Those fired would be blacklisted from all coalmines in the Makeevka area.
According to Vishnevsky and Garaschenko, the number of miners fell drastically once the threat was made.
It is unclear how many miners, if any, were fired as a result of the strike.
Ukrainian news media covering the Donbas reported that all 135 strikers were fired as a result of their protest.
However, workers at Kholodna Balka gave the Kyiv Post a set of different numbers.
According to two miners, only around five employees were fired as a result of the strike. The miners who were fired were those who started and the organized the protest, Garaschenko said.
Tokarev, the miner who had called for a strike multiple times on the group’s Facebook page, declined to be interviewed for this article, citing “bad consequences” from last week’s protest.
Delivery issues
Asked why the Kholodna Balka coal mine had apparently ran out of money, the miners provided a wide range of explanations, from accusing senior management of massive theft to saying that the coal could not be delivered due to the war.
Dmitro Snegiryov, an activist with Prava Sprava, a Luhansk-based civil society organization, attributed the delivery issues to transport problems.
In a Jan. 14 Facebook post, Snegiryov wrote, “the impossibility of delivering coal to power plants under government control, the transport blockade from the DNR, the destruction of mining infrastructure as a result of military activities and the fact that people often miss work to protect their lives has led the so-called Ministry of Gas, Energy, and Coal Industry of the LNR to mass reductions of workers in the coal-mining branch.”
The two breakaway regions stopped coal deliveries to government-controlled territory in November, before restarting the shipments a month later.
Coal accounts for around 30 percent of Ukraine’s power generation.
Kyiv Post staff writer Josh Kovensky can be reached at [email protected]
