Political Involvement in Industrial Conflict in Ukraine during the World Economic Crisis , 2008 - 2010

The paper contributes to the literature on the post-communist political economy of protest, and specifically to the question how governments handle public discontent with the outcomes of transition. The paper argues that the current economic crisis disrupts a key element of the post-Soviet political economy, workplace welfare. In the pre-crisis past, workplace welfare was found to contain worker militancy via the discretionary distribution of housing and basic healthcare. The crisis combines with the increase in political liberalization witnessed by Ukraine ever since 2004 to create incentives for political forces interested in questioning privatizations to take the workers’ side in plant-level conflicts. The disruption of workplace welfare led to several instances of worker militancy in 2008-2009, and the paper maps how political forces try to contain or use worker militancy against political opponents. The paper shows that while the Party of Regions has focused on strengthening its grip over the top echelon of Ukraine’s trade union federation (FPU), the former government of Yulia Tymoshenko has shifted from ignoring workers to taking more decisive action in supporting worker demands. The paper focuses on the situation in the Kherson, Vinnitsa, and L’viv regions, the sites of recent worker protests and government action in response to such protests. The data comes from an ongoing ethnographic study (2007-2010) of several machine-building plants throughout Ukraine.