Women workers in the Soviet mining industry: A case‐study of labour protection

Abstract

THIS ARTICLE FORMS PART of a broader study of Soviet women workers and protective labour legislation in the 1920s and 1930s.1 The underlying argument of this research is that whilst labour legislation introduced in the early and mid-1920s was designed to 'protect' women workers during the process of their accommodation into the industrial labour force, such measures were ignored and sometimes overwritten during the period of the first three five-year plans. There could be two explanations for this. Firstly, Stalin's ideological solution of the 'woman question' in 1930 pronounced the 'equality' of Soviet women and rendered the further introduction of special measures aimed at protecting female labour unnecessary. More convincing, however, is the argument that the requirements of rapid economic expansion placed unprecedented demands on the labour force which necessitated the employment of women in a whole range of tasks, many of which had previously been reserved for men. Despite the mass employment of women in the Soviet economy by the end of the 1930s any real equality in the labour force was inhibited by both vertical and horizontal sex segregation. By this time women constituted a greater proportion of workers employed in heavy industry than in the previous decade, but female labour remained concentrated in the less prestigious light industrial and service sectors. In virtually all areas of employment women had lower levels of training and skill and, therefore, continued to earn less money than men. The major areas of protective labour legislation for women included the regulation of hours of work, the establishment of maximum weights of loads and the control of physical working environments. Relatively progressive maternity provisions were also introduced.2 The social investigations and scientific research conducted into these issues and the resulting legislative enactments are reasonably well documented in the contemporary Soviet journals and secondary literature. The research into this topic has also yielded some unanticipated results.3 Despite the fact that the Soviet labour code included a ban on the employment of female labour in underground work in mining, the published literature does not discuss the reasons for the prohibition or the realities of the continued employment of women in underground tasks after the end of World War I. The research has been further inhibited by the lack of an extensive survey in Western literature of the Soviet mining industry in this period. Archival sources and personal testimonies, however, have