This year Miner’s Day coincided with the celebrations of the 16th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence. Naturally, both holidays could not avoid a touch of politics in the current early election campaign. Visiting Chervonohrad, in Lviv oblast, on the occasion of Miner’s Day, Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko promoted his social initiatives, stressing that social policies in Ukraine should be radically revised.
Greeting Ukraine’s miners, the president noted that coal mining plays an extremely important role in Ukraine’s energy independence. “I am sure we will revitalize the coal-mining sector,” he said, without, of course, recalling that it was his cabinet that had adopted and carried out (nearly completely) a pit closure plan that did not envision any essential re- employment measures for miners and their families.
The president criticized the coal-mining management system. In trying to put this across to journalists, not miners, in Novovolynsk, he emphasized that new mines and long walls do not open “very often” in Ukraine. As a result, coal output is declining; there is no “profound technological modernization” in the sector; and “allotted funds are utilized ineffectively, the key factor behind the unsatisfactory state of all management systems and of the ministry that exercises control over this sector as a whole.” Yushchenko stressed that he will be paying special attention to this sector, including when it is time to draft the budget.
BYuT leader Yulia Tymoshenko also tried to draw Luhansk miners into her election campaign. As always, she did it extremely inventively, perhaps remembering the great Cervantes’s words that “nothing costs less nor is cheaper than compliments of civility.” Accordingly, she apologized to the miners “on behalf of all the consecutive governments of independent Ukraine for the fact that certain governments brazenly cashed in on budgetary funds, some officials destroyed and drained mines,” while “politicians have basically done nothing in the 16 years of independence, apart from saying some nice words.”
According to Tymoshenko, Ukraine should minimize the use of natural gas, cut oil consumption, and focus on wide-scale and rapid development of the coal industry. “Our political force wants to take a written commitment to Ukrainian miners, no matter in which region they live,” Tymoshenko told a press conference in Luhansk. She must have amused the miners when she said that last year her daughter and son-in-law Sean Carr visited a mine and saw the hard work of miners with their own eyes; her son-in-law was so impressed that he composed a song that he will soon launch.
Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych has a somewhat different approach to coal-mining problems. Speaking at a ceremony in honor of the 60th Miner’s Day, he said: “Today we are not speaking of pit closures, as we were in the 1990s, but of the coal-mining sector development, and the reconstruction and construction of new mines. Yet it is important to prevent the shortage of both coking and power-generating coals, as the protracted slump in coal production this year is already sending a warning signal. So the goal in the next three years is to reach a yearly output of 100 million tons of coal.”
The prime minister said that miners are now receiving essential governmental support: for the first time since independence, all sector-oriented budgetary programs have been properly funded. Miners were given UAH 3.3 billion from the budget in the first seven months of this year, an increase of 1.3 billion compared to the same period in 2006. More than half a billion hryvnias of this increase was used for construction, technological retooling, and major repairs of mining equipment.
Yanukovych spoke about the high wear-and-tear rate of mines’ fixed assets, the chronic shortage of investment resources — which does not even allow for the simple reproduction of fixed assets — disproportionate prices for coal, purchasable equipment, material resources, and services. He highlighted the absence of a long-term price- and-tariff policy as a basis for regulating relations between the state and basic coal market subjects, such as coal-producing businesses, railways, power plants, and steel mills.
Nor did the prime minister dodge such negative social and environmental consequences of mass-scale pit and quarry closures as the dwindling prestige of miners, workforce turnover, and aging, which resulted from the first, chaotic, stage of restructuring in the sector. “To overcome this, we have to make relevant economic, standard-setting, and legal decisions, effect structural transformations in the sector, and set into motion mechanisms of its self- development. There is no doubt that the upcoming political battles will only reinforce our positions, and we will be able to pass laws in the nearest future to solve other problems that coal miners are facing,” Yanukovych said. He cited such top government priorities in the coal-mining sector as non-stop modernization of mines, the main link in the coal-producing chain; application of up-to-date technologies, including those related to occupational safety; reduction of production costs, and use of viable mechanisms for attracting investments to this sector. He also talked about improving the system of miners’ wages and social guarantees, adopting the law “On the Prestige of Minefield Work,” and developing a sector-related research.
