Link to this page: http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/issue/491/2517
From The Socialist newspaper, 14 June 2007
How Mittal makes millions
HOW DOES Britain's richest man - Lakshmi Mittal, Tony Blair's pal and the Labour Party's biggest financial backer - make his billions? By exploiting workers (and paying no tax)!
Dave Carr
As part of his global business empire which made him a £19 billion fortune, Mittal owns Lenina mine in the former soviet republic of Kazakhstan (ruled by the despot Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose state forces routinely attack the workers' movement and members of the CWI*).
Mittal is the country's biggest employer with 50,000 workers and has been appointed Kazakhstan's special envoy to Britain.
But Mittal is no 'model employer'. Some 91 miners have been killed at Lenina mine since 2004. The Sunday Times reports that at the plant in 2006, when 41 miners were killed in a massive explosion, managers told miners to ignore safety concerns with the ventilation system and go underground in order to meet production targets.
One miner said: "The pressures local managers put us under to meet targets so they can collect their bonuses are more and more stressful. We are being exploited like animals."
Despite Mittal paying compensation to the dead workers' families and raising wages, trade unionist Pavel Shumkin said: "He is making huge profits at the expense of miners who are made to work like dogs in appalling conditions. The miners all agree: compared with life now under Mittal, for them everything was better in Soviet times."
(*CWI - the Committee for a Workers' International, the socialist international organisation to which the Socialist Party is affiliated)
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In The Socialist 14 June 2007:
No to attacks on pay and conditions: leaflet
Come to the National Shop Stewards Network Founding Conference
Founding Conference of the National Shop Stewards Network
Stoke: Anger at postal privatisation
Unison national conference
Fight attacks on the public sector
Members' discontent strengthens left in UNISON elections
Campaign For A New Workers' Party public meeting
Swansea workers fight privatisation
What we think
United public sector struggle needed
Socialist Party NHS campaign
Labour climbs down in Wales - but for how long?
Coventry - Anger at NHS redundancy threat
Stem cell potential to break medicine bottleneck
War and terrorism
Stop The War Coalition - demonstration
Anti-Bush day in Italy - A tale of two protests
G8 Summit protests
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G8 protests: Determination wins through
International socialist news and analysis
Boycotts of Israel: Will they help the Palestinians?
Western hypocrisy over 'democracy' utilised by Putin
Socialist Party news and analysis
Oil, profits, sleaze and hypocrisy
Amicus conference: Unite and New Labour
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