In Ukraine, Illegal Mines Beckon the Jobless

TOREZ, Ukraine: Every day, Sanya works eight hours in an illegal mine hidden away in a forest, extracting coal with three other men. They work with hand-held tools far below the surface, sometimes going down as deep as 150 meters. A compressor taken from an old car powers a motor that drags the coal out of the mine.

Sanya, 25, who did not want his last name to be used because he is engaged in illegal activity, is paid both in cash and in kind. At the end of his workday, he lashes a bulky sack of coal onto his bicycle. He will use it to heat his home: It is nearly as valuable to him as the $35 he earns each week.

This is the same coal that fuels the power plants and steel mills in the Donetsk coal basin of southeastern Ukraine. It shapes life in the small mining town of Torez, many of whose inhabitants, including Sanya, have been forced by changing economics to turn from the state-run mines of the Soviet past to illegal small-scale mines.

Coal was once king here. But the development of Siberia's rich energy resources - first coal, then oil and gas - came at the expense of the Donbass, as this region is known. By the time of Ukrainian independence in 1991, the coal-mining industry, starved of funds, had become highly unprofitable and inefficient. It remains in dire disrepair.

Today, most Ukrainian mines are old and deep, making extraction difficult and costly. The government has closed scores of them, marginally increasing profitability and safety. But the process has left many miners jobless or without steady work.

Another miner who declined to give his full name, Boris, 45, worked at the Progress mine in Soviet times, when mining was a prestigious job. But now, said Boris, who was laid off in 2001, "mining has lost its respect."

Under communism, miners' salaries were among the highest in the Soviet Union - three times the national average - and the job came with benefits like apartments and early retirement.

Miners were role models, admired for their physically exhausting labor and their contribution to society. One local hero was Aleksei Stakhanov, the Torez miner who became an icon of socialist-realist propaganda in the 1930s and lives on in the concept of production speed-ups known as Stakhanovism.

The contrast with today could not be starker. Miners' wages are extremely low - they average $160 a month at state mines in Torez - and often go unpaid. Most mining families cannot afford cars, vacations or health care beyond routine treatment.

Working conditions are harsh. Ukraine has the world's second highest mining fatality rate, after China - an average of 317 deaths a year since 1990 - and miners are at high risk of respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses.

Torez, named for the French communist miner Maurice Thorez, was once a flourishing coal center. At the offices of Torezantratsit, the mining association that controls the state-owned mines here, the decline of the industry is immediately apparent. Now, as a large chart of red lights and production figures shows, six of the town's 11 mines have been shut down.

Progress, the largest mine here, is also at risk of being shut down in a privatization and mine-closure process that began in 1996 and has left 600,000 in the mining sector unemployed. Even with more than $1 billion in annual government subsidies, most state-run mines cannot make ends meet.

Many young people and laid-off miners have left Torez for the nearby city of Donetsk and for Rostov, just over the border in Russia. Others have headed to Moscow or St. Petersburg to work in construction.

And some work in the illegal mines.

"People improvise - we're good at it," said Gennady Gorbenko, a taxi driver and former owner of an illegal mine.

Gorbenko said he shut the pit and sold his equipment in 2005, scared by government efforts to crack down on illegal mining, a move that began under President Viktor Yushchenko after the 2004 Orange Revolution. His two sons were unable to find legitimate mining jobs, even after graduating from the mining school in Torez, Gorbenko said, and they, too, now drive taxis.

"There's no future in Torez," Gorbenko said. "Instead of closing down the illegal mines, why doesn't Yushchenko pass a law to legalize them?"

Even after the crackdown began, about 300 illegal mines still operated in the Torez area, employing a significant portion of the city's population.

"Wages at state mines may be higher, but at my mine, workers were paid every Sunday," said Gorbenko. State mines often pay only a percentage of the declared wages, and paychecks can arrive several months late.

"People don't care that the mines are illegal," said Igor, a police officer and former miner who also did not want his full name used. "They need to make money. Only the people on top care."

Igor lives near the Lesnaya mine, which was shut down five years ago. His apartment building and others nearby are now only 30 percent occupied. There is no central heating or gas, and many apartments do not have running water. After the gas was turned off 12 years ago, Igor installed a stove powered by coal from the illegal mines.

Jerry Triplett, an American mining engineer based in Kiev who works on mine-safety programs, said he thought that illegal mining represented more than just deviance from legal norms.

"When a group of guys gets together to dig for coal in the forest, this is a sign of entrepreneurship," he said. "This is capitalism taking root and miners realizing that they can do things more efficiently and more profitably on their own, without help from the state."

Triplett said the process of registering a legal mine is so bureaucratically laborious that paying off the relevant authorities - usually the local police - to keep an illegal mine operating is far easier than running the business legally. In effect, he said, mining reform and failing institutions have put into place a system of lawlessness and corruption.