After lunch, Kapustin led us on an expedition of the mine, and it was worse than anything I’d seen in Siberia, Ukraine, or Kazakhstan. The mine was a horror. There were no elevators, and the shafts were brutal and tight. It took some of the miners two hours of sliding and creeping along stone just to get to their work stations. Later, my back and legs were covered with bruises and I was more sore than I would have been if I’d run ten miles. Until the strike, the miners had not been paid for this “commuting” time: they tore themselves up, four hours every day, for free. “And we’ve taken you
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