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Doru hadn’t expected that his new profession as a postal worker would be so challenging. He had spent two decades laboring several hundred feet beneath the Earth’s surface, alongside hundreds of other Romanian miners, working a seam of gold — as his father and grandfather had done. It was a tradition of “brutal work,” Doru says, work that should prepare a man for anything. But his old work did not prepare him for his current job, where bags of letters arrive each morning, and Doru Milosav enters their origins and destinations with speed and precision into the post office computer. His mind is engaged in new and complicated ways thanks to an intensive series of ICT courses offered by a community telecenter in the mining town of Brad.
“I didn’t think that the work at the post office would also be difficult,” Doru admitted, standing in front of his new workplace a few blocks from the telecenter on a rainy February afternoon. “It requires a lot of thinking.” He uses the computerized Track-and-Trace system to catalogue all incoming and outgoing mail. A diminutive man with dark hair and a bushy mustache, Doru explains his daily tasks. “When the letters come in the morning I take over the bag with external letters and recommended express letters. I introduce the bar code into the system. I scan all the letters, I click with the mouse where I have to, there are certain documents based on which I have to give away the letters and the express post.” Reflecting on the recent hard times in the economically depressed region, Doru concludes: “In this town it’s a great job.”
Closing mines, adapting workers
When the Brad gold mine closed around 2006, 8,500 miners were laid off. These closures were part of a wider economic restructuring that hit the communities in the Jiu Valley of southwest Romania hard, where over 200,000 miners have been laid off in recent years. The gold mine in this region has been operating for 2,000 years, since the times of the early Romanians – the Dacia people. Mining is deeply woven into life, and identity. For most of the first week after the lay-offs Doru couldn’t sleep. “It was like my world collapsed,” Doru remembered. “It was very hard to abandon this field, it had a social impact on us.”
The state provided some unemployment benefits for a year or more, but after state assistance ended, psychological depression associated with unemployment was sharpened by the realities of making ends meet. “I was worried because I had a family that needed to be supported… I was nervous and worried because I didn’t have a job,” Doru explained. Other miners shared similar experiences. Rado Sabau, who worked for thirteen years as an underground electrical mechanics manager in the coal mine, put it simply: “I have to feed my family.”
A difficult transition
Inside the now-closed Tebea coal mine complex, Vasile points at the elevators that brought the men down into the bowels of the Earth every day, and then back up into the light. With six men on ea