Mining is a thing of the past in our region. Researchers are now collecting stories of former miners

Mining, metallurgy and all associated heavy industry have shaped the identity of our region since the nineteenth century. Now, with the major decline in coal mining across the region, part of that identity is disappearing. In the REFRESH project, researchers from the University of Ostrava want not only to record the memories of miners and metallurgists, but also to trace how they themselves have coped or are coping with this change.

The decline of the coal and steel industry is part of the transformation process of our region, which is looking for new ways of its own economically and environmentally sustainable development. There are tens of thousands of people in the Moravian-Silesian region who have had to leave industrial enterprises over the last thirty years.

Now two sociologists want to focus their research on their life experiences. How former miners and metallurgists managed or managed to cope with the loss of their jobs, how they were able to adapt to the new conditions and what life strategies they choose.

"My US colleague Dawn Norris and I are reaching out to miners and smelters, as well as other people who have worked in associated production, both women and men, to share their experiences. There are similar studies in Poland and the United States, but in the Czech Republic, only the technical side of things has been addressed, not the social side. We are now interested in the life stories of miners and metallurgists, and we want them to share with us various moments in their professional and private lives. Our research should be about a basic understanding of how these people subjectively perceive or have perceived their situation," says sociologist Dr. Nicole Horáková, who has long been involved in the sociology of work.

Where did the miners go?

The days when we could meet men with soot in their eyes on the streets are long gone. But that doesn't mean they have disappeared without a trace. They have just changed their profession, adapted to new conditions and no one knows where they have gone. "We want to find out how this occupational group is coping with this transformation, and in doing so we would like to help other professions threatened by changes in the labour market that are influenced by automation or artificial intelligence. People will have to be able to adapt to these changes. We would like to offer some strategies to help these people, because there is no literature on this topic yet," explains Dr Horáková, explaining the main aim of the research.

Dr Dawn Norris has experience of similar research in the USA, where she has looked at the ability of so-called "white collar" workers to cope not only with the loss of their jobs but also with the accompanying stress. “After coming to the Czech Republic, I researched how people coped with social changes after the Velvet Revolution, especially what the change or loss of a job meant to them. But now I was very interested in working with this, for me, new and unknown occupational group who worked mostly manually. I'm interested in how miners think about identity in relation to work, because the approach seems to be different for people in the US compared to people in the Czech Republic, including Ostrava," Dr. Norris explains.

The researchers now want to reach out to as many people as possible who have worked or are working in these manually demanding professions to interview them. "We are an industrial country. There are heaps of books on mining techniques and the like, but nothing at all on the people who are or have been involved in mining and associated production. So in our interviews with miners and smelters, we want to go as deep as possible, where we are interested in their subjective experiences as they recount them at home. We are interested in their stories. Even the literature on the transformation deals mostly with unemployment statistics, but no one looks at what happened to people who worked in the coal and steel industry, and that is what we want to find out," concludes Dr. Horáková.