AS Alexei, a 52-year old Kazakh coalminer, sat in the Soviet-style steam room
and cleaned up after his shift, he was relieved to have got through another
day unscathed.
Those working with Alexei in the Lenina mine in central Kazakhstan endure
conditions not seen in Britain since the 1930s. Miners describe a daily
shift as a “suicide mission”.
As he left the steam room, Alexei’s worst fears were realised as he saw a
column of thick black smoke rising from the lift shaft. The mine had been
rocked by a massive explosion and 41 of his colleagues, including eight
close friends, lay dead.
“I had just finished my shift and was washing in the mine’s sauna when the
blast went off,” recalled Alexei, a toothless, rugged Kazakh who has worked
at Lenina for 15 years. “We didn’t hear anything but realised something
terrible had happened when thick smoke rose up.”
The exact sequence of events that led to the explosion in September 2006 at
Lenina – which occurred during routine maintenance work on the ventilation
system – is now the subject of a criminal investigation and a trial of eight
middle-ranking managers on charges of negligence.
It is one of a series of incidents at the Kazakh mines owned by Arcelor
Mittal, the company headed by Lakshmi Mittal, Britain’s richest man with a
fortune of £19 billion. They have cost the lives of 91 miners since 2004,
raising concerns over safety standards.
During maintenance work on the ventilation system, the presence of gas in the
mines can rise to dangerous levels, so safety regulations stipulate that
only engineers carrying out the work should be allowed down the shafts.
However, according to wit-nesses, on the day of the Lenina blast, miners were
sent underground by managers apparently unwilling to stop work because of
the pressure to meet targets.
While the local managers’ role is under scrutiny, miners said last week that
responsibility for safety at the mine lay with Mittal. Mittal’s company,
which recently took over Arcelor, the rival European steel company, bought
the Lenina mine and seven neighbouring facilities in 1996. The coal is used
to power his vast steel plant nearby.
In Kazakhstan, Mittal is the biggest employer with 50,000 workers. He
generates 4% of the country’s gross domestic product and has been appointed
its special envoy to Britain.
When he bought the mines, the workers and their families had high
expectations. “When Mittal arrived on the scene there was some hope that
things would improve,” said Pavel Shumkin, a former miner turned trade
unionist. “Now you’ll be hard pressed to find a miner who thinks that. The
truth is that he is making huge profits at the expense of miners who are
made to work like dogs in appalling conditions.
“The miners all agree: compared with life now under Mittal, for them
everything was better in Soviet times.”
Once a thriving community of 80,000 people, row after row of five-storey
Soviet–era apartment blocks now stand empty in the mining town of
Shakhtinsk. Piles of rubble, concrete slabs and twisted metal – debris from
derelict buildings recently pulled down – litter the streets.
Children and stray dogs play amid the rubble, now home to only half the
previous population. Some of the coalmines have been shut down and
abandoned, others work day and night at depths of up to 2,300ft.
Last week miners claimed that targets to produce certain amounts of coal per
shift put pressure on workers and managers to cut corners. In back-break-ing
work that would be carried out by machines in western mines, gangs of four
or five Kazakh men, working seven-hour shifts, remove by hand up to five
tons of coal a day which falls off the underground conveyor belt.
One said: “The pressures local managers put us under to meet targets so that
they can collect their bonuses are more and more stressful. We are being
exploited like animals.”
Miners said managers routinely withheld part of their salary if the targets
were not met, and safety regulations were regularly violated. Much of the
equipment used dates from the 1970s.
To save time, they said, lifts designed for no more than 28 people are crammed
with as many as 40. When portable gas detectors started beeping, warning
that levels might be unsafe, miners said that managers often placed
detectors on the ground where gas levels were lower and even covered them
with their jackets so they could continue working and meet targets.
Miners also complained about their rubber gas masks. “After a while they
become very uncomfortable because, when you sweat, they stick to your face,
so we often take them off and work
without masks,” said Evgeny, who works at Lenina. “You can hardly breathe and
the rates of lung diseases are high here. In the West miners have disposable
masks made of cotton, but they don’t supply them to us.”
Miners and engineers said the equipment used to douse water on coal dust –
which is highly explosive – to prevent it catching fire in case of a
blast was outdated and often ineffective.
Mittal Steel says it has invested more than £132m on safety at the mines since
taking them over in 1996. It added that there was no safety equipment when
the mines were state-owned and injuries had fallen by 70% since.
In the aftermath of the September 2006 explosion, Mittal, accompanied by
senior aides and local officials, met several of the families of the dead
miners to express his condolences.
One was Galina Knish, a nurse, mother of two and widow of Alexander, whose
remains were so badly burnt and scattered so far afield that some of his
body parts were found only two weeks after his funeral, causing the family
to live through the added trauma of having to bury him twice.
Seated in Knish’s modest one-storey house, Mittal listened to her and,
according to the widow, seemed genuinely surprised at the impoverished
conditions in which the family struggled to survive.
“Mittal was kind and considerate,” said Knish. “He listened attentively,
seemed upset at what had happened and several times repeated that all our
demands would be met. I believed him.”
She is disappointed not least with the continuing poor conditions but also
says that she cannot afford the house she sought as compensation. In total
Mittal spent £1.8m to compensate the families of the 41 dead miners. The
highest single payment was £50,000, the lowest £25,000, according to
official documents seen by The Sunday Times.
Shortly after the Lenina explosion, thousands of miners employed by Mittal
went on strike and took to the streets to demand better conditions, improved
safety and a pay rise in a move which alarmed authorities.
Mittal quickly agreed to improvements in pay, in some cases raising salaries
more than threefold. Now, after taxes and pension contributions, the highest
salary is about £450 a month.
The miners say their safety concerns have not been addressed. “We worked in
hellish and deadly dangerous conditions and will continue doing so.
Absolutely nothing has changed,” said Yuri, as he prepared to start his next
shift at Lenina.
Kazakhstan is not the only country where Mittal has experienced safety
concerns. Accidents have occured in Bosnia, Roma-nia, the Czech Republic and
Macedonia as well as in South Africa over the past few years.
This weekend Arcelor Mittal said safety concerns were being tackled. The
company is about to secure a £51m loan from the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development to carry out improvements over the next three
to four years. It is pledging to install the latest German equipment in the
mines.
A new chief executive has been appointed and management has been sent on trips
to Mittal’s US facilities, regarded as some of the best in the world.
Adam Price, Plaid Cymru MP and son of a Welsh miner who has followed Mittal’s
activities abroad, said: “The Labour party was founded partly out of a sense
of revulsion at the terrible conditions in UK mines. The money they have now
accepted from Mittal is splattered with the blood of innocent miners and the
party should apologise to the Kazakhs immediately.”
David Sadler, the company’s vice-president for health and safety, Asia and
Africa, said: “Investment in and development of health and safety are
priority areas for Arcelor Mittal.”
Miners claim they have seen little evidence of improvement and fear that money
may have been siphoned off at local level. One said: “Either way, he
[Mittal] has his share of the blame. Unless that changes, the next tragedy
is just round the corner.”
The road to tax-free riches
— Lakshmi Mittal, who will be 57 on Friday, is the richest man in Britain with
a fortune of £19,250m, according to The Sunday Times Rich List.
— He was brought up mainly in Calcutta, where his father was a
successful steel trader.
— In 1976 he moved to Indonesia and turned around a struggling steel
plant owned by his family. He then snapped up former state enterprises
around the world to build a global empire that now produces 10% of the
world’s steel.
— In 2004 Mittal – named Lakshmi after the Hindu goddess of
prosperity – paid £70m for a house in Kensington Palace Gardens,
London. He spent £30m on his daughter’s wedding in 2004 – a
six-day ceremony in Paris and India attended by 1,500 guests.
— Despite his vast wealth, Mittal pays almost no tax in Britain as his
businesses and homes are owned by offshore trusts.
— He is one of Labour’s biggest financial backers. After he donated
£125,000 to Labour in 2002, Tony Blair wrote a letter to the Romanian prime
minister endorsing Mittal’s bid to buy a state-owned steel company.
— Mittal donated a further £2m to Labour in July 2005 and another £2m in
January this year. Mittal, an orthodox Hindu and vegetarian, practises yoga
every morning and enjoys the demands of cross-country skiing.
Capitalism is an investion of the west. Now they are at the receiving end of it, thanks to indians/russians/chinese. Welcome to the brave new work, where money is the bottomline. Human life has lost its value. But the blind greed is prevalant even in america and among the white man.
Maqbool, London,
You do not get that rich by being a considerate person. He has applied for a loan of £51m. He could have easily taken it from his own money but why when he can borrow, and if business fails, he will not loos anything, I am sure he has planned every thing, or has employed others to ' carry the can '
victor, westclff on sea, uk
This is disgusting and pretty much true. Too bad that the way that asian people do bussiness has become a standard procedure in western Europe too. They live like indian princes on western land. Everybody embrace them because they bring capital and help bringing globalization to the final line. Nobody cares about poeple anymore, or work condition, or people life and children future for crying out lound! Profit, profit, more profit....Is the new form of slavery right there....
pesimist, London,
Mittal is a majority stakeholder in ArcelorMittal as well as many other financiers the Luxembourg government and private investors.
You cannot isolate one single incident and blame the man for exploiting workers to amass great wealth. A matter more for ArcelorMittal and it's health and safety operators to awnser for, more than the man himself.
Roman Abramovich? Oh no, we wouldn't want the Times to "investigate" some of his dealings now would we!
Charles Pearson, London,
Coal is a dangerous work . This is disgusting .
Nicholson, Kirkcaldy, Scotland
Mittal has done a lot to improve conditions in the steel industry. This article appears to have been witten with the aim of insulting Mittal rather than as a news item. Shame.
Jason Saha, leeds,
The photo is enough. This is disgusting. He is a great guy.
edward evans, London, UK