Ukraine confronts labor shortage as need for soldiers drains workforce

PAVLOHRAD, Ukraine – Going to work is an escape for Tatyiana Ustymenko. She rides an elevator down more than 1,500 feet into a coal mine and leaves behind her cellphone – meaning no distractions from the latest developments at the eastern front line just 60 miles away. That far below ground, she also can’t hear the air raid sirens warning of a Russian missile strike.

“It’s peaceful,” Ustymenko said. “You forget there’s a war going on.”

Were it not for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, Ustymenko wouldn’t have this job. The coal mine in Pavlohrad allowed women to work underground for the first time in its history only after Russia invaded in February 2022. It was desperate to fill the many vacancies left by men who joined the military.

The mine is not the only workplace experiencing a critical labor shortage. Online job portals in Ukraine say they have never advertised so many openings. Millions of Ukrainians moved abroad to escape Moscow’s brutal bombardment, and of those who stayed, hundreds of thousands of men have traded their jobs for military service.

Now, with Kyiv ramping up its mobilization efforts, businesses expect that workers will be even harder to find, further straining Ukraine’s crippled economy. With more openings than jobseekers, many businesses have had to raise wages to compete – or they risk shutting down.

Ukraine’s lack of laborers – a problem expected to get worse the longer the war goes on – is adding strain to an economy that is already under pressure and reliant on foreign aid. In the first year of the war, Ukraine’s gross domestic product declined by 29 percent. It has rebounded since then as a new defense production sector has boomed and the country managed to restart traffic in its largest Black Sea port in Odessa.

But “without Western financial aid, the Ukrainian economy would collapse,” said Serhiy Fursa, an economist and deputy director of Dragon Capital, an investment firm in Kyiv.

Rolling blackouts across the country from repeated Russian strikes on energy infrastructure interrupt work or force businesses to invest in costly generators. That has also scared away some private foreign investment. Ukraine is still expected to experience relative economic growth of about 4 percent this year, but it would be more if not for the workforce shortage, Fursa said.

For example, he said, metals factories could increase their production if not for the shortage of staff. He projected that the mobilization of 200,000 to 300,000 new soldiers would reduce economic growth by about 0.5 percent.

“But this pressure could increase if many people get scared and leave the labor market,” Fursa said. “If 200,000 to 300,000 people are mobilized, many may decide it’s better to hide from draft officers somewhere than go to work, leading them to leave the labor market. In that case, the impact on economic indicators could be much greater. It’s impossible to calculate this accurately because we don’t know how many people are currently hiding and not working.”

One unintentional result has been some gender equalization in the workplace as many industries have opted to hire women for roles that were previously reserved for men because they were considered too labor-intensive. Not unlike the surge of American women who went to work during World War II, Ukrainian women are getting new career opportunities to operate machinery in factories, drive tractors or serve as bodyguards.

Kyiv’s subway system, which lost nearly a third of its prewar staff to the military, last month announced the first training courses for women to become train conductors. In the eastern Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, ArcelorMittal – a steel plant – has billboards showing women wearing the plant’s uniform with the slogan, “Ladies really run things here!”

At Pavlohrad’s coal mine, the change in policy to allow women to work underground created an opportunity for Ustymenko, 40, to obtain her dream job. All of the men in her family were miners. After her father showed her the mine, and its vast network of tunnels, for the first time when she was 16, Ustymenko longed to spend more time in what she described as a different world underground.

In the months after Russia’s invasion in February 2022, miners in Pavlohrad regularly pulled double shifts after roughly 15 percent of the staff left to fight the Russian invaders. Then DTEK, the mine’s owner and Ukraine’s largest private energy company, invited the women who had been working jobs on the surface to apply for work underground – an opportunity for a higher salary and the chance of overtime shifts.

Ustymenko was among the first to raise her hand. Some jobs were still off-limits, but others with less physical strain, such as servicing the small electric trains that haul workers from the lift shaft, are now done by the more than 120 women underground.

“At first, the men didn’t quite understand how this could work,” said Olha Khandryha, 36, who has worked in the mine for two years. “They all said, ‘They won’t manage, they won’t cope.’ Not everyone, of course; some said, ‘The girls will show you how to work.’”

“Over time, it was forgotten,” Khandryha added. “Now no one even remembers that they once said such things.”

But even with companies hiring more women, a workforce shortage persists.

Andriy Chernetskyi, deputy chief executive officer of DTEK’s coal facilities in Pavlohrad, said each mine is consistently short at least 100 workers. Other Ukrainian hiring managers said the threat of mobilization taking away a significant percentage of their staff has led to them hiring more young men – under the minimum conscription age of 25 – in addition to women.

The Ukrainian government has allowed some industries – such as those in critical infrastructure and defense production – to “reserve” their male employees from being drafted. But most enterprises that qualify can exempt just 50 percent of their male staff in what managers described as a tedious and bureaucratic process.

Businesses that comply with tax laws in good faith and maintain proper records are popular targets for military recruitment because their data is open, making it easier to mobilize their employees, Fursa said. Men, therefore, might choose to work elsewhere.

Farms are among the businesses that can exempt half of their eligible male workers, but especially during planting and harvesting seasons, there has been a shortage of tractor drivers since the invasion started, said Denys Marchuk, the deputy chairman of the All-Ukrainian Agrarian Council.

Qualified staff are especially scarce and hard to replace, Marchuk said, and the paperwork to reserve some employees from conscription can often take up to two months to be processed. In that time, men are at risk of being drafted, especially in rural areas.

“The agricultural machinery we use is highly sophisticated and expensive, costing between $150,000 to $200,000,” Marchuk said. “It is impractical to entrust such equipment to untrained individuals, as improper use could result in costly damages. And training new personnel, including young people who are not subject to mobilization, is crucial but time-consuming, taking at least six months. In the meantime, essential agricultural activities cannot be paused.”

Marchuk said some farming universities are already tailoring courses for women, such as instruction for long-haul driving. But even after the war, “there will not be an immediate influx of personnel due to casualties and injuries. The sector will face a significant labor shortage,” he said.

The management at the coal mine in Pavlohrad isn’t sure if the decision to allow women to work underground is permanent. No one knows when the war will end, or what will happen when it does and thousands of men head back to their old jobs.

The women who have grown to love their jobs in the mine’s depths hope there will still be room for them. Already, they said, the male miners react with surprise anytime they see a man working in one of the jobs now allotted for women.

“But at least from those women I personally know and communicate with, we really don’t want to leave,” Ustymenko said. “Because here, besides all of the social benefits, we have gained a certain collegial atmosphere, which is completely different from before.”