Work, class, and community in contemporary Kazakhstan: Changing regimes of industrial labour in a former Soviet steel town

My current research project is an ethnographic study of Central Asia’s largest integrated steel plant, the ArcelorMittal-owned steel works in Temirtau, Kazakhstan, known in Soviet years as the Karanganda Metallurgical Combine “Karmet”. My research addresses how working conditions and workplace culture have changed over the postsocialist decades, which forms of labour restructuring and flexibilisation are being implemented, and how these transformations are reshaping the content of work and social relationships among workers. More broadly, I am interested in how steel is being produced under global corporate capital and in the distinctiveness of Kazakhstan’s national capitalism. Inside the factory, my project’s emphasis is on the new divisions and inequalities on the workplace. Central ethnographic questions regard the past and present of the “ethnic division of labour”, how relationships of authority in production (i.e. between ordinary workers, foremen and line-managers) have evolved, and how recent restructuring processes affect workers’ attitudes towards their job and their social interactions on the shopfloor. Outside the factory, I’m interested in workers’ status in a rapidly changing urban landscape, their contemporary livelihood struggles and strategies, and in the way they reproduce themselves as a social class.

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