The Daily Life of the Cheremkhov Miners in the Year of the Great Turning Point: The Collective Agreement of 1930

Abstract

The article is devoted to the everyday life of the Cheremkhov workers through the content of the Collective Agreement of 1930 concluded between the Cheremkhov Union of Miners and the Mine Administration. In regional historiography, the topic of everyday life of coal industry workers has not been disclosed, which determines the scientific novelty and relevance of this article. The Contract determined the amount of wages, conditions of employment, production standards, provision of work clothes and housing, it recorded a list of working specialties with a description of the level labor mechanization. The purpose of the study to analyze the everyday life of Cheremkhov workers. The authors used the case study method, source and comparative analyses, a systematic approach, and the concept of Siberia industrialization by V. P. Zinoviev. The Document was adopted in the year of the Great Turning Point – the transition from the legal functioning of the labor market to the prohibition of market relations. The text of the Contract reflects both the inertia of the previous era and the emerging realities of the new era of labor relations. Its primary characteristic is the decisive role of party bodies, which prescriptively determine the main parameters of production standards. The priority was to increase labor productivity, increase output, and consolidate working hours. In conditions of predominance of manual labor and weak mechanization, this led to an increase in the exploitation of workers. At the same time, the Document protects some workers’ rights in the sphere of work and life, so the authors compare it with the Collective Agreement of 1904 between Baku workers and Caspian oil industrialist. There are no fundamental differences between these documents, and the working and living conditions have not changed since 1904. The authors concluded that the terms of the 1930 Agreement indicate that even such a highly paid and politically privileged part of the workers of Siberia as the Cheremkhov miners lived in difficult housing conditions and were forced to maintain vegetable gardens and livestock.

Keywords

• collective agreement
• eastern siberia
• 1920–1930s
• coal mining industry
• everyday life