Ihor Smetanin, who critisized bosses over July 29 explosion killing 28 men, says he is under pressure.
Openly criticizing dangerous conditions in which Ukraine’s underpaid coal miners work can be a bad career move.
Ihor Smetanin said he has been asked by management to leave the company. He was a wagon driver at billionaire Rinat Akhmetov’s Luhansk coal mine, where 28 miners died in a methane explosion on June 29.
But Ihor Kyryliuk, spokesperson for Akhmetov’s Metinvest mining and steel conglomerate, said Smetanin got a job at another company-owned coal mine, Samsonivska-Zakhidna.
Ukrainian coal mines are considered among the most dangerous in the world, with an accident rate of two people per one million tons of coal extracted.
By the time this edition of the Kyiv Post went to press, Smetanin couldn’t be reached on his mobile phone for confirmation.
One of the workers who brought the bodies of the dead miners to the surface, Smetanin vaulted on to the national spotlight after a video appeared online in which he blamed the mine’s management and owners for the deaths.
“My supervisor gave me a sheet of paper and told me to write a resignation letter, saying that we won’t be able to work together,” Smetanin told the Kyiv Post in a phone interview on Aug. 8.
“Look, don’t you understand that I won’t be able to stay there. Even if I stay, they will let me work for a month or two and then eat me alive. It’s better to quit.”
In the video that may have cost him his job, Smetanin openly lamented the unrelenting pressure by mine owners to increase coal, saying that the coal miners “died because they keep [telling us]: ‘Come on! Faster! Give us [new] shafts, give us millions.”
Other miners have gone public in recent years.
Experts and free trade union activists say Ukraine’s authorities and business tycoons tightly control thousands of miners working in more than 1one hundred mines, in part through non-independent unions.
Ukrainian miners are, on average, paid less than colleagues in neighboring Poland, despite strong business margins at the local mines. Domestic mines are also notoriously more dangerous.
The miner’s departure from his job comes just days after Prime Minister Mykola Azarov unexpectedly backed him.
Without naming Akhmetov or managers by name, Azarov blamed the “greed” for the accident and promised protection to the miner.
Billionaire Rinat Akmetov
“I believe him (Smetanin). I see that he is desperate,” wrote Azarov on his Facebook page. “I will make sure his frankness doesn’t cost his job.”
Vitaly Lukianenko, Azarov’s spokesman, said the prime minister is aware of the situation and instructed his subordinates to ensure that Smetanin is reinstated at Sukhodilska-Skhidna.
“It’s a double-edged situation,” Lukianenko said. “Officially, Smetanin quit himself, even though one might imagine they forced him do so. If they did force him, he will get his job back.”
Speaking to journalists on Aug. 11, Azarov reiterated his intentions to hold oblast officials responsible for Smetanin’s employment. “We won’t let anyone do away with Smetanin, no matter who he is,” Azarov said.
But in an earlier interview with Kyiv Post, Smetanin said that despite all the trouble he got into, he does not regret what he said, even though he was very pessimistic that conditions at his coal mine will improve.
I am not sorry for what I said, but on the on the other hand, nothing will change. I should have just quit quietly and gone on searching for a better fate.
– Ihor Smetanin
“I am not sorry for what I said, but on the on the other hand, nothing will change. I should have just quit quietly and gone on searching for a better fate. [After the videotaped interview] my life has gotten much worse. I am on the verge of a nervous breakdown right now,” Smetanin said.
Ukrainian coal mines are considered among the most dangerous in the world, with an accident rate of two people per one million tons of coal extracted.
This is almost triple the mortality rate of the Chinese coal mines, 10 times higher than in Russia and almost 100 times higher than coal miners’ mortality in the United States.
According to the experts, the widespread use of shady intermediaries and tax optimization schemes, common practice of selling the coal at below the market rates, as well as the chronic unwillingness of the billionaire owners to invest into the mines’ safety and modernization could be at the root of the problem.
Kyiv Post staff writer Vlad Lavrov can be reached at [email protected].
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