An alarm sounded in the converter shop, followed by the deafening blast of high-pressure oxygen being blown into the huge furnaces. ‘They run 24/7,’ said Yerbol Ismailov, a manager at the Qarmet integrated steelworks in Temırtau, in Kazakhstan’s Karaganda region. Eight metre-high ‘ladles’, trundling endlessly on rails, poured molten iron into the converters, sending up showers of sparks. A few workers hurried about this huge space, amid grey and yellow smoke and an acrid chemical smell of industrial paint.

The facility has to be continually patched and repaired. ‘We’ve just replaced 50,000 square metres of roof,’ said Ismailov. The plant, which the Kazakh firm Qarmet bought from Luxembourg-based multinational ArcelorMittal in 2023, has barely changed since Soviet times, when it was one of the biggest steelmaking operations in the USSR. Even in its present condition, it remains central Asia’s largest producer, exporting to China, Morocco and the Middle East.

Like many mining and industrial complexes in Kazakhstan, Temırtau was originally a gulag labour camp (Karaganda Lager – ‘Karlag’ – no 99, established in 1931). With extractivism, it grew into a city, and by the late 1980s, the steelworks alone employed nearly 47,000 people, out of a total population of 245,000. After the end of central economic planning and the plant’s sale to ArcelorMittal in 1995, socioeconomic conditions deteriorated. By 2023 only 16,000 workers remained, forced to work at a punishing pace under increasingly hazardous conditions – there are fires, and floors and roofs frequently collapse.

Monthly pay is around the national average ($912 in 2023), except for the growing number of workers employed by subcontractors, who get a quarter of that – and not every month. In 2023 ArcelorMittal owed around $300m to local subcontractors; some of that debt is still outstanding.

There’s also a coal mining side to the operation. A dozen pits around Temırtau provide fuel to (…)

Full article: 1 994 words.

(1) Tommaso Trevisani, ‘Work, Precarity, and Resistance: Company and Contract Labor in Kazakhstan’s Former Soviet Steel Town’, in Chris Hann and Jonathan Parry (eds), Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism: Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject, Berghahn, New York, 2018.

(2) Wladimir Sgibnev and Rano Turaeva (eds), Mining Cities in Central Asia and the South Caucasus: Survival strategies under conditions of extreme peripheralisation, Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde, Leipzig, 2023.