Urals miners are to keep their jobs after one day on strike
The strikers of the Mariinsky mine have ceased their protest and returned to the surface. For nearly a day, a total of seventy-six individuals had stayed underground due to concerns over the enterprise's potential closure and subsequent job cuts. Rostec, the mine's owner, had confirmed their intention to temporarily suspend operations and abandon the underground beryllium mining method due to its lack of profitability. However, in response to the protest, Igor Yudin, deputy general director of RT-Capital, reassured the workforce that no layoffs would occur.
"To ensure the preservation of our mining personnel, we have made the decision to explore the possibility of simultaneous underground and open-pit mining. This entails conducting further research, assessing economic viability, developing a project, and subsequently presenting it for discussion," Yudin explained.
Previously, Rostec had claimed that the strike was "provoked" by a few activists. The workers expressed discontent with the company's development plans, which included mothballing the mine, transitioning to open-pit mining, and constructing a factory. In response, authorities established a working group to address the issue. The company had threatened to fire the strikers if the "sabotage" didn’t stop. The miners' wives and children gathered at the company's premises.
"They were basically meeting all production deadlines. On Monday, my husband came home from work and told me, 'We're facing layoffs; the underground mining of precious and semi-precious stones is no longer sustainable. The financial burden is too great,'" revealed one of the striking miners' wives.
It has been reported by It's My City that the miners demanded a video conference with Vladimir Putin. However, regional ombudswoman Tatyana Merzlyakova later refuted claims of such a request.
In 2022, labor strikes occurred in various regions of Russia. Over 300 employees at the Ural Compressor Plant demanded higher wages and called for a criminal investigation against the management, who had urged them to work without pay. Following IKEA's departure from Russia, 500 employees in the Kirov and Leningrad regions signed a petition in a bid to retain their jobs.
In Izhevsk, AvtoVAZ employees implored Putin to prevent widespread layoffs and preserve production lines. They cited a shortage of foreign components as the reason for the plant's current downtime. A month later, the management dismissed 2,000 employees with severance pay of five to seven months' wages.