Introduction: Mining Capitalism from Below

On the one hand, the mining sector on both sides of the border between Congo and Zambia border was long dominated by large companies that put in place a paternalistic labour regime (see Chapter 1 of this book). From the 1930s, they built housing estates and social infrastructure allowing them to take charge of, and control, the lives of their workers and their families. This regime was continued into the 1980s when the Zambian Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM) in Zambia and the Générale des Carrières et des Mines (Gécamines) in Congo – the two SOEs that resulted from the merger and nationalisation of colonial mining companies after independence in the 1960s – began to decline.

On the other hand, the liberalisation of the mining sector has attracted foreign companies of various sizes and origins in both countries. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Zambian and Congolese governments were under pressure from the World Bank to dismantle their mining SOEs and to take measures to attract foreign investors in the mining sector. The two countries then witnessed an influx of companies of all kinds: American majors, Canadian juniors, South African and Australian exploration companies, Chinese SOEs, and businessmen from Belgium, India, or Israel – in short, all the actors of the global copper-mining sector. They were competing to take over the most promising assets of ZCCM and Gécamines at low cost and/or to obtain rights over untouched world-class deposits.

Unsurprisingly both the Congolese and the Zambian mining sectors have been the theatre of numerous mergers and acquisitions since the early 2000s. Despite this eventful history, almost thirty mining projects – including a dozen large or mid-sized projects – have now entered the production phase. Together these projects produced two million tonnes of copper in 2018, that is, eight times more than ZCCM and Gécamines at their record low in 2000. Once the dozen mining projects still in the development phase start production, the Central African Copperbelt may well become one of the world’s most important centres of copper mining.

By examining the power relations involved in the implementation of new labour management strategies by new mining companies, the broader ambition behind this book is to understand how new labour management practices are built from the ruins of twentieth-century paternalism. To what extent do these new labour practices break with those of ZCCM and Gécamines in the past? Our hypothesis is that new mining projects should not be exclusively conceived as the result of external forces, but as the outcome of a ‘formation’ process involving various categories of actors both inside and outside corporations (on the concept of formation, see Berman and Lonsdale 1992; Bayart 1993). This is especially the case since mining projects have become very capital-intensive. To make their investment secure and profitable, foreign companies have to cope with the pressures exerted by political leaders, the laws enforced by state officials, and the demands made by trade unions and the workers – a set of rules, norms and expectations that are, in the cases of Congo and Zambia, profoundly marked by the paternalistic model inherited from Gécamines and ZCCM.

Putting in place a particular labour management strategy does not fall within the perfectly controlled implementation of a rational plan: it is a complex process of improvisation and adaptation, giving rise to various forms of mobilisation, translation and resistance (Akrich, Callon and Latour 2002a, 2002b; see also, in the anthropology of development, Olivier de Sardan 2005; Mosse 2005; Lavigne-Delville 2012). Our aim is accordingly to understand how a range of actors involved in the domain of work in Congo and Zambia understand and transform mining companies’ labour management practices. Far from colonising a terra nullius, these companies are caught in various constellations of power which influence how their projects are carried out. This approach ‘from below’ is not meant to underestimate the power of foreign corporations but to reposition their projects within the complex power relationships that mediate them locally, and to capture the distinctive dynamics created by these interactions. It also involves paying particular attention to the historicity of practices and discourses relating to work in the mining sector. Because of the century-old inclusion of the mining industry in the social fabric of both copperbelts, the expectations and conflicts aroused by the arrival of new companies cannot be adequately understood independently of the model provided by ZCCM and Gécamines in the past. From this perspective, the recent boom in foreign investments in Central Africa is not viewed simply as a form of ‘dispossession’ by a new form of imperialism (Harvey 2003; see also Li 2009, 2011, 2017), but as a more complex ‘grafting’ process (Bayart 1994, 1996), through which mining capitalism becomes entangled in the historical trajectories of the two copperbelts in new ways.

This relationship is a long-standing area of research in the literature on mining since the 1950s (Epstein 1958; Nash 1993 [1979]; Parpart 1983; Moodie 1994; Kublock 1998; Finn 1998; see Rubbers forthcoming). The main focus of this body of literature has been the ability of workers to create a world of their own in the mines, and the development of a militant working-class consciousness. Special attention has historically been paid to their social and cultural life, to strikes and other forms of resistance, and to the dynamics of trade unionism. For various reasons, this interest in class politics has tended to fade into the background in the literature on the most recent mining boom, in which a new generation of mining projects use excavation and processing techniques that enable them to mine large deposits with fewer workers than in the past. At the same time, because these projects have a shorter lifespan than those that came before them, their impact on the environment is more visible and impressive. Today, mining companies dig, in a few years, holes wider and deeper than those their predecessors made in almost a century.

In this context, researchers’ attention has been largely concentrated on the new type of relationships that mining companies develop with local communities in the Global South: the protest actions of local communities against mining corporations (Bebbington and Bury 2013; Kirsch 2014; Golub 2014; Sawyer and Gomez 2014; Li 2015; Filer and Le Meur 2017); the tendency of mining projects to operate inside securitised enclaves isolating them from this potentially hostile environment (Ferguson 2005, 2006; Hönke 2009, 2010; Appel 2012; Côte and Korf 2018; Pijpers 2019); the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes to win some support in the local communities (Hilson 2012; Szablowski 2007; Dashwood 2012; Rajak 2011; Welker 2014); and the broker role played by local elites, especially customary chiefs, in these politics of contention and patronage (Manson and Mbenga 2003; Negi 2010; Geenen and Claessens 2013; Capps and Sonwabile 2016; Smith 2018). Labour is not absent from these studies on the relationship between companies and communities, but tends to be reduced to the issue of access to jobs, and to be exclusively understood in terms of compensation (Filer and Le Meur 2017: 17). As a result, the social condition of mineworkers, and the politics of production more generally, is only discussed briefly and marginally in this body of literature, when it is not discarded outright as being of secondary importance.

If industrial mineworkers are no longer centre stage in the literature on mining, several social scientists have nevertheless sought to understand how they have been affected by the transformations undergone by the global mining industry since the 1990s: the rise of subcontracting, the promotion of a safety culture, the adoption of 12-hours shifts, the development of fly-in fly-out operations, the provision of credit facilities, and/or the co-optation of trade unions as corporate partners (Rolston 2010, 2013, 2014; Donham 2011; Bezuidenhout and Buhlungu 2011; Rajak 2012, 2016; James and Rajak 2014; Moodie and Von Holdt 2015; Capps 2016; Kesküla 2016, 2018; Botiveau 2017; Keskula and Sanchez 2019; Phakathi 2018).1 This is particularly the case in South Africa, where researchers have continued to investigate the social world of miners from different perspectives. The Marikana massacre, in which thirty-four miners were killed during a strike in 2012, sparked an avalanche of analyses about the changing nature of work in the mining industry, the new face of trade union politics and state violence in post-apartheid South Africa (see, e.g., Alexander 2013; Chinguno 2013; Stewart 2013; Moodie 2016). In contrast to studies on mineworkers in the twentieth century, these authors do not seek to depict class cultures. Distancing themselves from a research agenda in terms of class making, they focus on how workers cope with new labour management techniques.

Even if mineworkers are now fewer in number and politically weaker than in the past, these studies show the insights that can be gained from taking work as a lens to study the transformations of the mining industry in the twenty-first century. This book follows this line of enquiry by focusing on the ‘micropolitics’ of work. This concept of ‘micropolitics’ is of relatively common use in the social sciences, including mining studies (e.g. Negi 2011; Rubbers 2013; Pijpers 2018). Although the meaning conferred to it in these studies is presumably close to the one we give to it below, what it is supposed to highlight, or the type of approach it calls forth, remains unclear or indefinite. Below the concept of ‘micropolitics’ is elaborated in more detail as a heuristic tool to explore the power relations that come into play in the domain of work. Its aim is to make operational the approach of the mining boom from below advocated above.

In contrast to recent scholarship in mining studies (O’Neill and Gibson-Graham 1999; Welker 2014; Golub 2014), the purpose of this approach is not so much to dissolve the representation of the mining corporation by showing how it is enacted as an ideational macro-actor in different ways depending on circumstances than to bring to light the material, social and symbolic work necessary for developing mining projects in a given context. Building on recent scholarship in the anthropology of capitalism, we seek to understand how these extractive projects are generated out of the social networks, life projects and ethics of various local actors (see Yanagisako 2002; Ho 2009; Shever 2012; Bear 2015; Bear et al., 2015; Tsing 2015). The various forms of disposition and capital that these people bring into mining projects can be viewed as productive powers essential to the expansion of mining capitalism in different parts of the world.

Since it focuses on everyday practices, this anthropological approach runs the risk of disintegrating mining projects into a multitude of practices and discourses and, in so doing, of putting too much emphasis on the contingency of their operations, the uncertainties with which they are confronted, the very fragility of their existence. This is a pitfall that would make it difficult to account for the development of capitalism in the longer term. Yet, as we have seen above, the history of copper-mining capitalism since the nineteenth century shows certain regular tendencies, which derive principally from the continued increase of demand for copper, the inexorable depletion of copper deposits, and the price inelasticity of both supply and demand in the copper market. From these basic tendencies result – among other things – the expansion of copper-mining capitalism on a global scale, the increasing mechanisation of production, the escalating capital intensity of the industry, the growing importance of financial actors, and the booms and busts of investments. As the literature on mining reviewed above suggests, these general trends have had far-reaching consequences on workers globally.

The challenge for the social sciences is to relate the contingent practices that enable the accumulation of capital on a day-to-day basis to the longer-term tendencies that characterise the history of capitalism (Sewell 2008). To make this connection, we propose to include in the analysis of the micropolitics of work the government techniques that mining companies, but also trade unions, state administrations and other institutional bodies, use to organise their activities and structure work practices in the mining sector: these include safety rules, industrial relations procedures, labour laws, etc. Although these government techniques do not come from the same source of power and are used for different purposes, they contribute to making the work environment in which mining companies operate more stable and predictable, two fundamental conditions for the development of modern capitalism according to Max Weber. This is, I would add, a fortiori the case for industrial mining projects. While they are confronted with strong uncertainties of various sorts, the importance of their capitalisation calls forth a long-term amortisation plan – a necessity which is often overlooked by the media when dealing with mining investments in Africa.

In the context of the recent boom, the global mining sector has witnessed the diffusion of new labour management techniques in the form of more or less standardised models (management software, surveillance devices, lean management solutions, participative methods, etc.). This diffusion accounts for the apparent resemblances in the organisation of work between numerous mining projects around the world. These management techniques have nevertheless been appropriated selectively by the different companies that participated in the boom. In each of these, some new techniques coexist with older techniques (recruitment methods, collective agreements, personnel archives, welfare programmes, etc.).

Drawing inspiration from Foucault, the mining corporation can be seen as an assemblage of multiple ‘government techniques’ whose implementation involves complex ‘power games’ – the micropolitics of work of this study – and which contribute to establish more or less stable ‘states of domination’, and which we term ‘labour regimes’ in the next chapter. Focusing on corporate government techniques is not new in mining studies. Whether they explicitly build on the work of Foucault or not, several social scientists in the past twenty years have studied some of the government techniques that mining companies put in place, especially the securitised enclave and CSR programmes. These studies examine in great detail the power games involved in the implementation of such techniques as well as their power effects. As they focus on a single government technique, however, they miss a key point of Foucault’s approach, that of taking into consideration the variety of government techniques, which often have distinctive backgrounds and involve different power games (Rubbers 2020; see Lascoumes 2004; Lascoumes and LeGalès 2005; Rose, O’Maley and Valverde 2006). Once examined through these government techniques, mining companies – and mining capitalism more generally – appear caught in different power constellations and timescapes (Bear 2015; Bear et al. 2015).

The first power constellation to take into consideration is, of course, the union field.1 In the sociology of Bourdieu, the field is a relatively autonomous space of confrontation organised around specific issues or resources, and structured by specific institutions, rules, and cultural dispositions (see Hilgers and Mangez 2014). In both copperbelts, the mining boom was accompanied by a revitalisation of union activities, with trade unions entering into a fierce competition to represent workers in the new mining companies. Their introduction into these companies has confronted the unions with new challenges that have profoundly affected their strategies and the meanings unionists give to their action. However, far from being limited to the union field, the study of the micropolitics of work can also shed new light on conflicts in political arenas.2 Like the power field, the concept of political arena refers to a space of confrontation organised around specific issues or resources (Bierschenk 1988; Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 1998). In contrast to the power field, however, this space is thought of as relatively localised, unstructured and heterogeneous. In other words, the political arena is not organised by specific institutions, rules and cultural dispositions. In a context where well-paid jobs are few, the competition in the labour market is strong. Far from becoming a secondary issue, access to employment is high on the list of demands made to mining companies, and various political actors try to act as labour brokers between the local communities and the mining companies. In both countries, chiefs, ethnic associations and local political authorities do not hesitate to recommend people to mining companies, to exert pressure on their local content policy, and to intervene in labour disputes.3 The term ‘local content policy’ refers to all the measures taken by mining companies to contribute to local economic development. These measures mostly focus on increasing local employment, procurement, and subcontracting. Finally, it is possible to study the micropolitics of work from the various categories of state and non-state actors involved in the implementation of labour policies (political leaders, senior officials in national ministries, labour officers, labour consultants, union representatives, HR managers, etc.). These actors are not viewed in this perspective as competitors striving for specific resources in a power field or in a political arena, but as translators along chains of political action (see Pressman and Wildavsky 1973; Lascoumes and Le Galès 2012).

No matter which power constellation is taken into consideration, special attention must be paid to the scale at which it comes into play. Indeed, the micropolitics of work is not confined to the local level. Workers’ claims during a strike, for instance, are likely to be instrumentalised by actors in the union field, the political arena, or even along the public action chain at the local, regional, national, or international levels. In doing so, claims are subjected to a complex work of selection and translation which allows strikers to win supporters and opponents outside the workplace. In return, this process can affect the way workers perceive the situation and interact with their employer.

Beyond these political constellations, which feature various forms of institutionalised power, a micropolitical approach involves exploring the broader social inequalities that the boom in mining investments has contributed to generate or exacerbate: the recreation of the colour bar, gender and generational dynamics, or new patterns of social mobility and inequality. Among these forms of inequality, gender receives special attention in this book (see Chapter 3).

As part of their paternalistic policies, colonial mining companies established in the Central African Copperbelt sought to impose monogamy, domesticity, and the model of the patriarchal nuclear family upon their workers (Parpart 1986a, 1986b; Dibwe 2001; Rubbers 2015). Although few workers achieved this model, it nevertheless provided them with a set of norms by which to consider their marital lives, the education of their children, or their relationships with kin. Within the companies’ housing estates, the patriarchal family model gave rise to a new economy of social distinction, with the practices and symbols associated with ‘modern’ family life being used by men and women to claim moral credit and social superiority. From the 1970s onwards, however, the decline in workers’ remuneration gradually undermined men’s authority over their wives and children as they found themselves unable to meet their households’ needs. To supplement their revenues, their wives and children developed their own economic activities and gained more autonomy within the family. In these circumstances, the norms and hierarchies constitutive of the patriarchal family model were increasingly subjected to resistance and arguments.

As new mining companies hire mostly men, they contribute to reproducing the mine as a masculine space and to restore the authority of male mineworkers within the family. On the other hand, some companies have developed gender equality programmes and a small number of women have been appointed to positions that were once exclusively occupied by men, such as geologists, electricians, or loader drivers. Moreover, most workers now belong to a generation that has been in contact with new models of love, family life and social success. It can be assumed, therefore, that they do not simply reproduce their parents’ family ideals and norms, but ‘regenerate’ them in new ways; they come into ‘fresh contact’ with the legacy of patriarchal family and paternalism (Cole and Durham 2006). To understand how work in the mining sector contributes to generating new gender dynamics, Francesca Pugliese and James Musonda focus, in Chapter 3, on the everyday life of female mineworkers in the workplace and at home, and reflect on the historical significance of their experience.

At the societal level, many studies focus on the dispossession of local people by foreign companies and conclude that their new mining projects only benefit the few (shareholders, political leaders and a minority of workers).4 This critical line of analysis can be found in most studies on mine-affected communities cited above as well as in a multitude of reports on the social impact of mining investments by non-governmental organisations. If this analysis – that the contribution of mining investments to local development is limited – is not wrong, it is also far too simplistic, as it leads to a stark opposition between a minority of winners and a majority of losers. A focus on the micropolitics of work provides a better starting point to study the class inequalities generated by the mining boom. As Wright (1997; see also Rubbers 2019a, 2019b) reminds us, the analysis of labour relations is key to making sense of the dynamics of class divisions caused by the development of capitalism, in this case, mining capitalism. Such an approach provides a more complex picture of these dynamics than an approach exclusively focusing on the property of the means of production.

To study the micropolitics of work in the mining sector, a team comprising six researchers including myself carried out extended fieldwork in Zambia and Congo from 2016 to 2019.1 This book is the result of the WORKinMINING project at the University of Liège, Belgium (see www.workinmining.ulg.ac.be). The research project was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant programme (ID 646802). It is published as an Open Access volume under the Creative Commons licence CC-BY-NC. During this period, we interviewed or had in-depth informal conversations with more than 600 people involved in the mining industry, principally workers, managers, subcontractors, trade unionists, labour officials and political authorities at different levels. In addition to these interviews, we carried out participant observation both inside and outside mining companies: James Musonda spent nine months doing participant observation in a mining company in Zambia, including six months helping workers to carry out various tasks in an underground mine; Francesca Pugliese and Benjamin Rubbers completed one-month internships in the HR departments of three different mining companies in Congo; Thomas McNamara was granted a desk at the head office of the main mining union in Zambia, which allowed him to follow trade union representatives in their everyday activities during the entire period of his fieldwork; and Kristien Geenen and Emma Lochery had, respectively, the opportunity to follow a strike in a Chinese company in Congo and to attend professional training sessions for HR managers in Zambia. To varying extents, all team members also participated in the social life of research participants at home, in bars, at church, etc. Finally, the team did research in the archives and collected various types of documents from mining companies, labour courts and state administrations.

Our research was organised around three complementary subprojects, each carried out by two researchers, one in Congo and the other in Zambia.

The first subproject dealt with the multiple dimensions of the work experience in mining companies. Drawing inspiration from classical ethnographies of mining work cultures (Gordon 1977; Nash 1993 [1979]; Moodie 1994; Finn 1998), two doctoral students (Pugliese in Congo and Musonda in Zambia) studied the everyday life of various categories of mine employees at work, in the family, and during leisure activities. Their research focused on three main themes: workers’ tactics, that is, the multiple means through which they appropriate, change or undermine the social order of mining corporations; their moral economy, or the values that they use to evaluate their working conditions; and the gender and generational dynamics in which mineworkers take part. In developing these lines of analysis, their aim has been to understand how mining companies’ labour management techniques contribute to organising workers’ subjectivities, and to develop a broader reflection on the social and cultural changes that the mining boom has generated in both copperbelts.

Carried out by two postdoctoral researchers (Geenen in Congo and McNamara in Zambia), the second subproject focused on the dynamics of the trade union power field. As elsewhere, the existing scholarship on trade unions in Africa has long focused on their role in social and political emancipation movements. Distancing themselves from this tradition, Geenen and McNamara sought inspiration from ethnographies investigating the ordinary work of trade unionists and the dilemmas they face in dealing with employers and workers (Lubeck 1986; Von Holdt 2003; Werbner 2014; Botiveau 2017; Lazar 2017; see Rubbers and Roy 2017). Building on this body of literature, they paid special attention to everyday union activities in the workplace, the internal functioning of union organisations, and the competition between unions in the mining sector. This ethnographic approach allowed them not only to produce a ‘thick description’ of the critical moments of trade union life, such as union elections and strikes, but also to reflect more broadly on the role of trade unions in the emergence of a new labour regime.

Within the framework of the third subproject about the regulation of work, a postdoctoral researcher and the principal investigator of the research project (Lochery in Zambia and Rubbers in Congo, respectively) interviewed HR managers, labour officials and political authorities at different levels, from customary chiefs to national politicians. By including all the actors involved in the regulation of work in the mining sector, their ambition was to develop an understanding of industrial relations from below. Drawing inspiration from the literature on middle managers (Dalton 1959; Jackall 1988; Kunda 1992; Watson 1994; Mills 2002; Hassard, McCann and Morris 2007; Whyte 2013), they focused on the role of HR managers in the implementation of mining companies’ labour management strategies at the interface between expatriate executives, trade unions and state representatives. To study how labour inspectors, judges, or senior officials influence the organisation of work in mining companies, they built on recent ethnographies of the state in Africa (Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2006; Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014; de Herdt and Olivier de Sardan 2015) while giving special consideration to the way in which state officials understand and use the law (see Rubbers and Gallez 2015; Andreetta 2018).

The strength of this teamwork method is that it provides the opportunity to develop a comprehensive analysis of the micropolitics of work in both countries. For all the innovations brought to ethnographic fieldwork in the twentieth century, it has largely remained an individual activity. When embarking on a collective research agenda, this typically takes the form of individual research projects conducted separately in different places. Few anthropologists have followed the example of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute (RLI) research team of the 1950s in uniting their efforts to study the various dynamics constitutive of one macro-process, in the same area (Gluckman 1945, 1961; Schumaker 2001). This is the type of collaboration that we attempted to create. Since our research dealt with people in relation with each other, it provided the opportunity to enrich the three subprojects reciprocally (research on corporations, workers, trade unions and state representatives is complementary) and to avoid treating mining companies, the state or trade unions as monolithic institutions. In line with an anthropological perspective, their practices and discourses were studied at ground level, from the everyday work of the people acting as their spokespersons.

This teamwork method also allowed methodologically consistent comparisons to be made between our case studies. While team members had a great deal of freedom in conducting their respective research projects, they were asked, for each subproject, to answer the same limited set of questions, to share their data and to develop a coherent theoretical argument together on the basis of the comparison between their respective case studies in the Congolese and Zambian copperbelts. What is interesting in the comparison between Zambia and Congo is that, since the 2000s, they have witnessed a boom in foreign investment which has led to the development of new mining projects both in traditional mining areas and in remote rural areas. Although to varying degrees depending on their location, these mining projects – which, in some cases, have the same parent company – have to deal with the legacy of paternalism left by ZCCM and Gécamines.

In comparing our data, inspiration also came from the work of the RLI (Gluckman 1940a, 1940b, 1961; Mitchell 1956, 1983; Van Velsen 1967). Gluckman and his colleagues were among the first anthropologists to integrate a comparative approach into the research design itself; to take as units of comparison not cultures, but social processes; to replace these social processes within a wider power field and to analyse them in a historical perspective; and to conceive of the comparative approach not as a means of illustrating universal theories, but as a methodological device whose principal aim is to further explore, and better discriminate, the factors involved in the social processes under study (see Kapferer 2006). Indeed, the main difficulty with the comparison of social processes is to discriminate factors that may account for their similarities and differences as they change over time, involve different domains of practice, and contribute to changes at different scales (Moore 2005). As we will see in the next section, it is however possible, in the case of our research, to identify some of the factors or processes that are likely to affect the micropolitics of work.

In comparing the micropolitics of work in this space, the most obvious factors derive from the distinctive features of the historical formation of the mining industry, the state, the union power field and the working class, in both countries. These processes, which provide the background of the research results presented in Chapters 2 to 6, will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. The risk of a comparison between two countries, however, is to presume that they exhibit fundamental differences that need to be expounded in the analysis. After all, the idea that Congo and Zambia have completely different political cultures was taken for granted by many of our respondents during the research; it was also expressed in some conversations with other Africanist scholars. The aim of this book is not to add weight to this line of thought, but to highlight the different factors involved in the micropolitics of work and the power constellations in which they take part. Far from exclusively pointing to national differences, these factors also include determinants associated with geology, infrastructural geography, or power struggles at play at other levels such as those between financial markets and mining companies.

Following the ontological turn in the social sciences, several authors in geography and anthropology have highlighted the importance of geological constraints in the power dynamics around mining projects (Bridge 2000; Bakker and Bridge 2006; Bebbington and Bury 2013; Luning and Pijpers 2017). Each deposit has geological characteristics that require the use of specific extraction, processing and transport techniques, and consequently have effects on the conflicts around mining projects and the political regulation of the industry. Accordingly, the micropolitics of work in the mining sector of the Central African Copperbelt must be first understood from the constraints imposed by the geology of the mines: whether the mine is opencast or underground, whether the water table is high or low, whether copper grades are high or low, whether there are other minerals present or not: parameters that impact on the excavation and processing techniques used, the workers recruited, the labour management policy made possible, the profit margins achieved and, consequently, on the micropolitics of work.

To the constraints deriving from the nature of the subsoil, it is necessary to add those arising from the built environment on the surface (Rubbers 2019b). It is usual practice in the literature on extractive industries to make a distinction between ‘brownfield’ and ‘greenfield’ projects, both of which are found in both the Congolese and Zambian copperbelts. Whether the project is located near old mining towns or in a remote rural area has an effect not only on how workers are housed, the amount and type of benefits they receive, and their interactions with each other on a day-to-day basis, but also on the influence of trade unions, the role of local political elites, and the importance of divisions based on autochthony within the workforce. Having said this, it is also possible to find intermediate cases, such as mining projects in rural areas which are close to a former workers’ camp, or are near a relatively important town which lacks a mining past. Beyond the stark opposition between brownfield and greenfield projects, other essential factors are the development of infrastructures, the presence of industrial workers, and the political trajectory of the area where they are established.

If, in Montesquieu’s words, ‘the empire of climate [what we could call today the material environment] is the first of all empires’, it is certainly not the only one to take into consideration when comparing the power constellations that develop around work in the mining sector. The pressures that financial institutions such as banks and funds exert on mining projects are at least as important. In her book on Zambia, Lee (2017) highlights in a subtle way what distinguishes the labour management policies of mining projects funded by Chinese state capital and by global private capital. In contrast to multinationals, she explains, the presence of a Chinese SOE in the Zambian mining sector is not exclusively driven by the pursuit of profit, but also by strategic and diplomatic considerations. This ‘encompassing imperative of accumulation’ pushes it to prioritise long-term production over short-term profits and, if under strong political pressure (as it has been the case in Zambia since 2000), to make concessions to workers. This process may explain why, although wages in the Chinese SOE remain low, it provides more stable jobs than global private companies.

All these factors come into play in the comparison of the micropolitics of work between Congo and Zambia, independently of any consideration of these countries’ political cultures. Ore bodies in Congo, for instance, usually contain cobalt in addition to copper and have higher-grade copper than those in Zambia. In addition, many in Congo lie nearer to the surface, which is not the case on the other side of the border. These geological characteristics gave some mining companies in Congo – though not all – the opportunity to produce more rapidly and at lower cost when copper prices soared in the second half of the 2000s and, when the price of cobalt rose in 2017–2018, to offset low copper prices by selling a metal long considered a secondary product. This opportunity to make higher profits arguably gave mining companies in Congo more leeway in their negotiations with workers and trade unions than in Zambia.

In including these factors in the analysis, the challenge is not only to avoid the pitfalls of culturalism or methodological nationalism, but also to give room to the variety of mining projects to which the boom of foreign investments gave rise. Too often the attention of researchers has concentrated on a single mining project, most often a greenfield project by a multinational mining corporation. To compare mining projects from below, through a focus on the micropolitics of work, should make it possible to take into account the diversity of mining projects by type of mine, location, and the origins of capital and, in doing so, to develop a more complex understanding of the labour regime that is emerging in the twenty-first century.

As our hypothesis is that new mining projects are caught in various power constellations with specific historical dynamics, it is important to place the changes that they have brought to labour in Congo and Zambia in a longer-term perspective. To do so, the first chapter, co-authored by Benjamin Rubbers and Emma Lochery, builds on the existing literature to propose a historical comparison of labour regimes in the Congolese and Zambian mining sectors from the 1920s to the present day. This broad historical picture provides the necessary background for the following chapters, which study the labour regime that is currently emerging in more detail and from different angles.

The next two chapters, by Francesca Pugliese and James Musonda, emerge from the subproject on mineworkers. Chapter 2 deals with one of the most striking aspects of new mining projects, the importance given to safety. Although a concern with safety is omnipresent on mine sites, it has been largely neglected in the recent literature on mining. On the basis of two contrasting case studies, an open-pit mine in Congo and an underground mine in Zambia, the chapter identifies the measures taken by employers to make the work environment safer before focusing on how workers deal with safety rules and regulations in everyday life. This investigation leads the authors to reflect on the contradictions between these safety devices and the increasingly precarious nature of work in the mining sector.

Chapter 3 studies the changes in gender dynamics caused by the mining boom from the perspective of women working in mining companies: their hopes and motivations, the challenges with which they are confronted in and outside the workplace, and the strategies they put in place to overcome them. This category of women workers is neglected in the literature on both copperbelts, which focus exclusively on workers’ wives – the women targeted by the family policies of mining companies. Although female workers remain few in number, they provide an original angle from which to reflect on gender dynamics in the mining sector.

Chapters 4 and 5 are co-authored by Kristien Geenen and Thomas McNamara, who propose to compare the dynamics of the union power field in Congo and Zambia at two critical moments in the life of these organisations, union elections and strike actions. The study of union elections in Chapter 4 allows a better understanding of union politics in the workplace (workers’ motivations to engage in union activities, their electoral strategies, and their frustrations) in a context of strong dependence on employers. This dependence, the authors argue, lead union representatives to reflect on what it means to be a responsible trade unionist. This is an old question in both copperbelts, but one which takes on a new meaning in a political economy marked by repeated mass layoffs and the rise of subcontracting.

Chapter 5 compares the unfolding of two wildcat strikes in Chinese mining companies in Congo and Zambia. In doing so, it brings an additional perspective to the ambiguous relationship that trade unions have with workers and employers: in both countries, strikes are generally organised by workers without the support of trade unions. The two case studies also highlight the role that political leaders can play in labour disputes, and the special place that is given to Chinese firms in the political arena. By shedding light on the constraints faced by trade unionists in the workplace, and by replacing their ambiguous role in the historical trajectories of trade unionism in both countries, the chapters together provide a nuanced and comprehensive analysis of their actions that contrasts with the more militant approach usually found in the literature (see Rubbers and Roy 2017; McNamara and Spyridakis 2020).

The last chapter, co-authored by Lochery and Rubbers, closes these exploratory investigations into the micropolitics of work in the mining sector by focusing on HR managers. In both countries, HR managers are of Congolese or Zambian nationality, but work in the interests of foreign companies’ managers and shareholders. After examining their career paths and the multiple skills that they must develop as part of their job, the authors study how HR managers represent management’s interest vis-a-vis the workers and, outside the firm, state administrations and political leaders. Special attention is paid to the room they have to manoeuvre in implementing HR policies, and the multiple pressures they face in a context where jobs are few and precarious.

The Conclusion, written by Rubbers, attempts to outline the answers provided by the different chapters to the questions raised in this introduction: what are the labour practices of new investors? How far do they break with the paternalism of ZCCM and Gécamines? How are they negotiated by local actors? Which broader social and political dynamics do they contribute to generating? These lines of analysis conclude with some reflections on our research participants’ request for recommendations on improving the conditions of employment in the mining sector in Central Africa.