The budget of miners in Siberia in the late 19th - early 20th centuries

This article analyzes the budgets of miners in Siberia in the late 19th - early 20th centuries basing on the information from mining reports and works of district mining engineers, health officers, from surveys of the economic situation of workers that the Mining Office carried out on the eve of the First World War. The author calculated that at the end of the 19th century in the fields of Siberia workers received a deposit of 12.9 % of income, paid in taxes 2.1 %, send to families 5.3 %, spent by cash in the fields 2.6 %, received goods and products 50.7 %, got in payment 23.1 %, were to pay back 3.3 %. In the first ten years of the 20th century deposits disappeared, and less than 1% of income was spent as of tax payment. Despite the increase of the number of family workers in the fields, workers started to send more money to the families. For example, in the South-Yenisei district workers' costs in cash were increased to 16.2 %, but payment in kind still remained high, above 50 %. This proves the formation of permanent staff in the fields. Workers' payment forms in July 1914 give a rough idea about the correlation of wages of miners and their living wage during the highest level of miners' real wages. These results are compared with the cost of living for a single worker, a family of two persons and a family of four. The latter were obtained as the sum of the cost of the budget set, plus the costs for small needs and service staff (10 %), plus accommodation costs, if any. The spending rate for a family of two was 1.75 rates of a single worker, a family of four 2.42. The largest Siberian mining companies in 1914 employed almost twelve thousand adult men, and 1.7 thousand of them could not ensure their living wage. This amounts to 14.4 % of all recorded miners. Most of these workers worked in coal-mines, 30.7 %, some in the fields with dredges and in the Lena Goldfields Co's (LENZOTO's) mines, 6.6 % and 2.8 % respectively. Half of the workers could only provide for themselves. There was a majority of these miners in the Lena Goldfields Co's (LENZOTO's) mines (63.7 %), about 40 % in the coal-mines and 27.2 % in the mines with dredges. Not many miners could provide for a family of four. There was 9.5 % in the coal-mines, 27 % in the mines with dredges, 3.5 % in the Lena Goldfields Co's (LENZOTO's) mines, and that was only 7.4 % of them all. These numbers basically tally with the number of highly skilled workers at these enterprises who received from 2.5 to 4 rubles per shift. It is significant that on the whole the proportion of workers able to provide for a family of four was less than 3 % in the Lena Goldfields Co's (LENZOTO's) mines, and in engineering works it increased to 11 %. Calculations show a lack of budget of most families of miners in Siberia in the early-industrial period, which coincided with the all-Russian trend.

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