This article investigates why, in two very different regimes, similarly high levels of labor militancy are evident in Kazakhstan’s oilfields and South Africa’s platinum belt. It also explores the common dynamics leading up to the massacres at Zhanaozen (2011) and Marikana (2012). The hypothesis-generating most different systems comparison highlights the challenges of labor relations where extraction at fixed sites combines with volatile prices and shareholder pressures in a globalized economy to raise the stakes for business, labor, and state. Also significant are blockages in existing channels for bargaining linked to quiescent unions. These jointly necessary conditions account for increased militancy in extractive industries in Kazakhstan and South Africa. To account for the Zhanaozen and Marikana massacres, timing and sequence are considered. Both standoffs came later in the strike wave, prompting impatient state and business elites to criticize the protests as “criminal” acts, and priming security personnel to employ violent repression.
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