The past year has seen a wave of mobilisation inside Kryvyi Rih’s mining and metal complex, particularly at the flagship foreign ArcelorMittal plant, one of the largest metal plants in the world. After weeks of negotiations, workers officially announced a labour dispute in late March. Then, on 14 May, railway workers in Kremenchug started a work-to-rule action over conditions and pay, which was then taken up in soldidarity by railway workers at AMKR on 16 May. This solidarity action catalysed an existing dispute over pay at AMKR. AMKR plant management announced that it was shutting operations on 17 May.
This article, originally published in Ukrainian left-wing journal Commons, is the first attempt to analyse what is happening at AMKR in both the long-term and short-term perspective. With the author’s permission, we publish a translated and shortened version here.
Ukraine’s mining and metal industry was constructed largely in the era of fulfilled (and over-fulfilled) five-year plans. After Ukraine gained independence in 1991, these factories and mines played (and continue to play) no less a role than in the Soviet state. Today, every school student in Ukraine has to know about the shortcomings of the planned economy for their final exams. But after the transition to the market economy, these shortcomings became, if anything, more pronounced: throughout the 1990s, the share of ferrous metal production in Ukraine’s GDP grew thanks to loss of mechanical engineering and other branches of the country’s economy which produced goods with a high additional value.
By the early 2000s, steel exports had become one of the main sources of income for the state budget. Steelworkers could thus claim proudly that they were the ones responsible for bringing in the largest amounts of foreign currency, although the core of the 2000s boom also contained the factors that after 2008 would provoke crisis after crisis both in Ukraine’s economy and political sphere — the strong dependency on the global economy and concentration of profitable enterprises in only a few of the country’s regions. In recent years, the mining and metal complex has suffered, with the loss of mines and factories in Ukraine’s uncontrolled territories. At the same time, the proportion of complex production (cast iron, steel, prefabricated construction materials) within the production cycle has decreased while iron ore exports have risen.