Organised workers in eastern Ukraine are urging action to stave off the looming civil war, making their voices heard against bosses of all nationalities.The Krivyi Rih branch of the mineworkers’ union has issued a statement, not only supporting a workers’ pay campaign at the Russian-owned multinational steel company Evraz, but also denouncing “interethnic confrontation that is fuelling a hysterical mutual hatred between workers of different nationalities”.
The statement calls for “workers’ self defence” to “prevent the escalation of violence in Ukraine” and ends: “Long live international workers’ solidarity! By preserving the peace in Ukraine we will preserve the peace of Europe!” It has been published in English by RS21, a socialist group, with a call for a demonstration in London on Friday at the Evraz group’s headquarters. I hope this appeal gets a good response, not only on Friday but in the development of a solidarity movement with Ukrainian working people in western Europe.
Solidarity means listening to people and trying to understand the situations they face. And to that end I am publishing here (1) some comments on employers’ influence on trade unions in Ukraine, and (2) reports from friends in eastern Ukraine about workers’ views of the Donetsk and Lugansk “people’s republics”.
Bosses and trade unions
How could you not be confused by a call for strike action made this week by … the richest man in Ukraine, Rinat Akhmetov! He has called on workers at the metals plants and mines that he owns in Donetsk to stop work in protest at the so-called “People’s Republic” set up there.
Akhmetov was one of the key backers of the overthrown president Viktor Yanukovich. Since Yanukovich was defeated in February, Akhmetov has constantly been accused of supporting armed separatism in eastern Ukraine – and indeed the proto-fascist leader of the Donetsk separatists, Pavel Gubaryov, claimed the movement was financed by Akhmetov. But now Akhmetov has publicly stated his support for the Kyiv government.
In the second of two pro-Kyiv videos posted on Youtube, Akhmetov on Monday called on his own employees to strike against separatism. This followed the organisation of self-defence units by steelworkers at an Akhmetov-owned plant in Mariupol, the port city in Donetsk region. The units, formed last month with no apparent support from the steelworks management, were last week brought on to the streets with the managers’ active participation (according to this article in the New York Times).
Weird as it may sound to readers in many countries … workers are being mobilised by their bosses. Such alliances are a long and dishonourable post-Soviet tradition.
In the 1990s, miners and other industrial workers were for the first time developing independent unions that had been illegal and impossible to organise in Soviet times. At the same time, local bosses and would-be owners were battling for control of cash flows and assets with “the centre” (i.e. ministries in Moscow or, from 1991 in Ukraine, Kyiv). Both Russia and Ukraine suffered an epidemic of non-payment of wages by bankrupt enterprises. Plant managers would typically urge workers e.g. to block roads or railroads, or even kidnap visiting officials, to put pressure on “the centre”. The workers often needed little persuading.
These actions often made the headlines because the local bosses would also seek media coverage. Genuine workers’ actions, directed against those same bosses – typically, campaigns for better pay and conditions, and the right to workplace and community organisation – received far less attention. Sometimes, workers’ own actions and management-inspired actions overlapped or even fused, making things even harder to understand.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. In post-Yanukovich Ukraine, as well as the pay campaign in Kriviy Rih, there have been strikes by coal miners in the western city of Lviv and in Krasnodon in the east – at another mine owned by Akhmetov.
The Krasnodon strike was organised against Akhmetov, for better pay and conditions. Akhmetov’s own call for strike action, as part of broader action against the armed separatists, is political. Most likely, it is part of a bargaining process between him and the Kyiv government, about how to divide and rule Ukrainian workers in future. This in turn points to one possible direction that things might go: towards a drastically decentralised Ukraine, with the oligarchs’ hand strengthened against the Kyiv authorities in the east.Another point to bear in mind is that the independent mineworkers union of Ukraine (IMUU), to which the Krivyi Rih workers and many others across eastern Ukraine belong, has a leadership quite closely tied to the Kyiv political establishment. Mikhail Volynets, leader of both the IMUU and the independent union federation, was in 2007-12 a parliamentary deputy on the list of Batkivshchina, the bourgeois centrist party headed by former prime minister Yulia Timoshenko. This year Volynets joined the Council of Maidan, a group of would-be politicians and NGO leaders who claimed to represent the Maidan movement – and participated in a farcical and unsuccessful attempt to call a general strike in support of Maidan (see here). In recent weeks, the IMUU’s leaders in eastern Ukraine have come out clearly against separatism (see here).
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