The paper presents a detailed analysis of the evaluation of the situation with labor productivity in the coalmining organizations and identification of reserves (establishing untapped opportunities to save resources), resulting from the impact, interconnection and interdependence of individual factors. It is concluded that although there has been growth in all of its federal districts and coal basins in recent years, but productivity is lower than that of the leading foreign corporations from countries – Russia’s partners in the BRIC countries. The methodical approach is to identify internal reserves of labor in the coal industry on the basis of decrease (increase) in the estimated number of workers due to changes in the quantitative and qualitative factors. According to the authors, a successful transition to a market economy is more important than a scientific solution to the problem of finding reserve efficiency by productivity specialists. It is possible to solve it only on the basis of the ordering system to encourage a rational activity of a specialist, including virtually all aspects of labor processes taking into account the aggregate technological, technical, economic, organizational and legal factors.