Abstract
This chapter will discuss how labour and environmental movements were a response to exploitative working conditions and destructive ecological practices in the natural resource sector in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Rent extraction in the sector was accompanied by intense labour exploitation and insecurity, and significant negative externalities for local communities. While the social struggles had different dynamics in the two countries, they had a similar outcome: the triumph of transnational capital over labour and local communities. In Kazakhstan, the oil industry faced resistance from local workers, whose politicisation was violently squashed by the oil complex. In Kyrgyzstan, local communities rather than mining workers resisted the gold mining industry, galvanised by environmental concerns and resource control.
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Notes
- 1.
The share of Kazakhstani companies in the market of geological and geophysical services was only 28% (Global Value Chains Center, 2017). The local content of TCO purchases was merely 3%. Although leading Kazakhstani service companies operated in Russia, Turkmenistan, China and India, thereby demonstrating their international competitiveness, at home they were unable to break into the high-value production chain.
- 2.
At TCO, an average salary for an expat was almost 12 million tenge a month, whereas for a local worker it was about 739 thousand tenge.
- 3.
For instance, at Kumtor gold mine where foreign staff were paid 14 times more than local workers, local unrest decreased after local workers’ monthly earnings increased to about 3000 USD (Manasov, 2019).
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Sanghera, B., Satybaldieva, E. (2021). Fighting the Commodification of the Extractive Industries: The Labour and Environmental Movements. In: Rentier Capitalism and Its Discontents. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76303-9_9
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