Vol. 79/No. 11      March 30, 2015

“It’s important for people to know about our union and about workers’ willingness to act,” Evgenyi Derkach, a leader of the Independent Trade Union of Labor Protection at the large Yuzhmash rocket factory in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, told the Militant in a phone interview March 13. He had just come from a rally of 200 workers in front of the plant demanding months of back pay. “The Ukrainian government says we need to be obedient,” he said, in order to get loans from the International Monetary Fund and because of the separatist war in the eastern part of the country. “If the outside world knows about our struggle, it puts pressure on the authorities to take workers’ demands more seriously.”

“Yesterday I received a military draft notice, even though I’m exempt for health reasons,” Derkach said. “I believe it is the government trying to pressure me to back off from the union struggle.” Several weeks earlier, anti-union thugs had assaulted him in the street.

“The company understands if there is a free trade union they will lose control,” added Alexei Simvolokov, a leader of the Independent Trade Union of Miners in Dnepropetrovsk, who also took part in the Yuzhmash workers’ rally. He said a representative of the “official” trade union, which has close ties to management and the state — a throwback to the days when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union — handed out leaflets denouncing the protest.

Threats of more mine closures and unpaid wages have spurred protests by miners across the country. More than 1,000 workers from the seven mines of the state-owned Lvovugol coal company rallied March 5 in Chervonograd, a small city in the western region of Lviv. The action was part of a week of strikes, roadblocks and other protests demanding back pay, better conditions and a halt to mine closures. Workers suspended the demonstrations after the government came up with funds to pay a substantial part of the back wages.

Mine blast highlights conditions
“It took the mine disaster in Donetsk to get any action on the part of the government” on miners’ unpaid wages, Simvolokov said, referring to a March 4 explosion at the Zasyadko coal mine in that separatist-controlled city. Thirty-four workers were killed.

The Zasyadko mine, owned by billionaire Yukhym Zvyahilsky, an ally of ousted President Yanukovych, is notoriously dangerous. “Why haven’t they learned anything from the disaster in 2007 when another 101 hard-working miners were killed? They haven’t improved anything!” former miner Yuriy Tkachuk told the Kiev Post at the March 7 burial of some of those recently killed there. Separatist officials refused to allow volunteer rescue brigades from government-controlled areas to enter the mine.

After arresting the mine’s general director and saying they were considering whether to bring criminal charges against him, officials of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk let the bosses reopen the mine.

Despite occasional skirmishes, the cease-fire between Ukrainian government forces on the one side and Russian and separatist fighters on the other is mostly holding. Both sides have pulled back some heavy artillery and released several thousand prisoners taken during months of fighting that left 6,000 dead. Sporadic fighting continues near flashpoints like Debaltseve and Mariupol.

Now that the shelling has subsided, the devastating conditions working people face on both sides of the frontlines comes more to the fore. A new regulation passed by Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers March 4 requires hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the fighting in the east and by the Russian occupation of Crimea to constantly confirm their actual place of residence, or lose social payments. It is difficult “not to suspect that these new obstructions are deliberate policy, aimed at reducing the cost of providing for displaced people,” Halya Coynash wrote in a March 13 article published by the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.

Government ‘betrays the Maidan’
Workers at the international VIP lounge at the Boryspil International Airport in Kiev went on strike again March 12, following a four-day walkout in February. They are demanding reinstatement of workers they say were illegally fired and an end to harassment by management, which is pushing to privatize airport operations.

The strikers have a soup kitchen, reminiscent of those set up in the Maidan, with “all the flavors and emotions of the Revolution of Dignity, which gives us strength to fight on,” said Benjamin Tymoshenko, vice president of the Trade Union Association of Civil Aviation Flight Personnel, the Confederation of Free Trade Unions reported. He warned that the government was risking its own existence by “betraying the Maidan.”

“The situation in the rail sector is very bad as well,” Simvolokov told the Militant. Rail workers are currently taking the government to court “because they’re trying to cut pensions and end the right to early retirement, which they won previously because it’s a very dangerous job,” he said. “They’re also trying to get one person to do the work of two,” something rail workers in North America are quite familiar with.
 
 
Related articles:
Oil workers strike continues as focus shifts to local talks
On the Picket Line
London rally: ‘Release Ukrainian pilot jailed in Russia’
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home