Changing Life and Work of the Post-Soviet Working Class of Kazakhstan and Estonia

This comparative project focuses on the workers of mining industry in two post-Soviet countries – Estonia and Kazakhstan. It traces the changing industrial regimes after the collapse of the Soviet Union and workers’ adjustment to the conditions of market economy in heavy industry. In both of the contexts, the focus is on two main groups of workers. The first group is male underground mine workers who have lost their glorified status as the avant-garde of Soviet labour. The second group consists of female labour in coal or oil shale processing plants, those who have always been invisible as female auxiliary workers in heavy industry. The research focuses on questions of gender roles and understandings what consists of men’s and women’s work in heavy industry and how men and women relate to particular machinery and tools. In both of the contexts, there is a clear ethnic division of labour as the Russophone labour migrants or deportees work in the heavy industry whereas the native Estonian and Kazakh population are employed in the government and public sector. I explore how these tensions play out on the shopfloor and the in discourse of workers and how they relate to theories of class and intersectionality of ethnicity and class. The research also focuses on the questions of health and the body as well as local understandings of concepts of risk and crisis in the context of everyday work as well as the fluctuations of global electricity and coal markets.