Employees of a Chinese Full Gold Mining company are on strike for the fifth day in a row. Chairman of the Central Committee of the Mining and Metallurgical Trade Union of Kyrgyzstan Eldar Tadzhibaev told.
According to him, on April 30, workers of the gold mining enterprise, having received a refusal from the administration to raise wages, suspended all work at the mine. Employees demanded to increase wages by 50 percent, improve food quality, and stop the illegal practice of deducting the cost of equipment used in work from workers’ salaries. «The fact is that the cost of perforators, jackhammers, drills, drill bits, cables, blocks, light bulbs, wires used during the corresponding shift, is deducted from the wages of workers,» Eldar Tadzhibaev said.
Earlier, the legal and technical inspections of the Mining and Metallurgical Trade Union of Kyrgyzstan, after an audit, drew up a relevant act on these and other issues. However, the identified violations of labor legislation have not yet been eliminated.
«As for the wages issue, the administration proposes to raise rates by 10 percent, but the miners are demanding a more tangible increase in wages. Inflation was about 12 percent last year. Prices for food and services are growing. At the same time, the cost of manufactured products remains at a fairly high level,» the trade union explained.
After a recent increase in the wages of state employees, the salary of doctors, kindergarten teachers, teachers working in Terek-Sai village and nearby settlements, taking into account various premiums and additional payments, has reached 50,000-55,000 soms, while the salary of miners working in difficult and dangerous working conditions is much lower.
After negotiations on May 1, the employees of the office, the dry storage department, the processing plant, and the auto garage resumed work. However, more than 300 mining workers, including underground workers, continue to strike.
«The issue of meeting the fair demands of employees should be resolved by the company as soon as possible. At the same time, we call on the workers to get to work and resolve the labor dispute through negotiations. The republican budget is formed, among other things, at the expense of the deductions of the enterprises of the mining and metallurgical industry, from which the salaries of state employees are paid. The miners rightly demand higher wages for their work,» Eldar Tadzhibaev said.
