Romanian Leaders Squeezed by Miners

LUPENI, Romania — Adriana Sut lives with leaky bathroom plumbing, four hours of hot water a week and a broken elevator that forces her to climb the stairs to her seventh-floor apartment in a crumbling high-rise.

“We have heating for now,” the 28-year-old miner’s widow said on a mild autumn day in western Romania’s coal country. “But who knows how it will be in winter?”

Such deprivation breeds violent tempers among the 35,000 miners who toil beneath the wooded Jiu Valley, and Romania’s leaders fear their explosions of rage.

Since communism fell in 1989, the miners have rampaged with clubs through the capital, Bucharest, to oust one pro-reform government and have repeatedly gone on strike to protest poor living conditions and unpaid wages.

Now they are a potential thorn for newly elected President Emil Constantinescu, a political novice who has promised a quicker shift to free markets and a clear break with the Communist past.

To help attract foreign investment and please the West, Constantinescu must slash government subsidies to money-losing state industries. But doing so risks unleashing the miners again.

“Everything depends on how the government acts,” said Sut, whose husband died in a mine accident in June and whose brother still works in the pits. “My brother and his buddies were just talking about going on strike if the new government cuts back our benefits.”

Constantinescu, whose opposition alliance defeated the former Communists in November elections, has pledged “very difficult reform.” But he has fudged potentially explosive details, saying he wants to modernize the mining industry while trying to avoid major shutdowns and layoffs.

The Jiu Valley’s mines lose lots of money, and are heavily subsidized by the government. Romania needs the mines because it cannot afford too much imported energy. Home-produced coal provides about 37% of the country’s electricity.

Miners earn good wages by Romanian standards. Politicians have sought to dampen their rage with salaries twice the monthly average of about $100. Benefits, including free housing and utilities and generous holidays, also are good. When her husband died, Sut got a settlement of 50 million lei (about $12,000) for herself and her 5-year-old son, a fortune in Romania.

It hardly adds up to the good life, though.

“We are treated worse than animals,” said Gheorghe Postolache, one of 4,700 miners at Lupeni, about six hours by road west of Bucharest at the edge of the Transylvanian Alps.

In this industrial dead-end, workers’ families crowd into dank clusters of apartment buildings, children frolic in grimy courtyards, garbage rots in the street, chickens scratch the mud, and rusty heating pipes zigzag among the houses.

For entertainment, miners have liquor and foreign satellite TV.

Postolache sees no real progress since the 1989 revolution in which Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was executed.

“All that’s changed is that we have bars and restaurants everywhere now,” he said.

As bad as it is, life in Romania’s coal country looks pretty good to some recent arrivals. Vasile Gacea came west from Moldova looking for work in the mines, but got a job at a wood-processing firm instead.

His home is an unfinished shell of a building that looks as if it was caught in a war. Gacea, his wife and three children squeeze into rooms where rugs cover bare concrete floors and the wooden toilet is homemade.

For heating, coils of nickel wire set in white bricks and hooked up to bare wires in the wall give off a rosy glow. MTV flickers on a big color television, and Gacea professes to be happy.

The mines, too, are in woeful shape, neglected by post-Communist leaders unwilling to pay for improvements. Tools and equipment are old, and basic materials such as wood for shoring up mine shafts are in short supply.

At the same time, miners say bosses threaten to fire them if they do not meet production targets. Constantin Ionescu, director of the Lupeni mine, says its technology is 20 years out of date.

Ionescu said he expects Constantinescu to continue mine subsidies, but otherwise, “We’re not expecting a great deal from the new government.”