Optimize! Oil, Labor, and Authoritarian Neoliberalism in Kazakhstan

Abstract

“Optimizatsiya is a beautiful word while sokrashchenie (Rus.: ‘dismissals’) is not,” Kuspan remarked to me, referring to the ongoing restructuring of the oil service company where he had worked as a mechanic for the previous twenty years. It was the middle of 2017, almost three years after world oil prices plummeted in 2014, ending the bonanza that fueled Kazakhstan's double-digit economic growth since the early 2000s. As oil prices continued to decrease—bottoming out at around $30/barrel in early 2016—transnational oil corporations readily put on hold their expansion projects in the country, reducing the demand for drilling, construction, and transportation services. Thousands of workers were fired by subcontracting companies in order to “optimize” the production process, as corporate jargon put it.