2 Safety: The Politics of Life in a Neoliberal Labour Regime

As these quotes illustrate, safety is used as a public communication tool to demonstrate that the company cares for the well-being of its employees. At first sight, this message is principally for external audiences: the project’s funding bodies, which may organise audits to ensure compliance with international safety standards; the project’s stakeholders in the country where it is established, such as state representatives, trade unions, civil society organisations, or local communities; and of course, potential critics – journalists, advocacy organisations, or social science researchers. This message is intended to avoid scandal, external control, and the possible withdrawal of financial and political support. As with the discourse on Corporate Social Responsibility (Rajak 2011), the discourse on safety is aimed at promoting the image of a ‘caring’ corporation and, in doing so, at preventing the risks that emanate from the social environment of the mine.

When it comes to workers, the corporate discourse on safety provides a justification for the cumbersome rules and procedures workers must comply with in their everyday work routines and a response to critiques of the deprivation and precariousness in which new mining investors leave them. However, safety is not merely a discourse here. From a Foucaultian perspective, it can also be studied as a disciplinary government technique, that is, a power strategy that seeks to improve workers’ bodily dispositions through the control of space and the dispensation of both rewards and sanctions. As with the disciplinary techniques studied by Foucault, its underlying rationale is not only to increase workers’ efficiency, but also to protect their lives and preserve the company’s human capital.

First, the power of safety operates through the control of space and the dispensation of rewards and sanctions. As soon as workers enter the mine, whether at Kopala or Kinke, they are subject to this power strategy. They are greeted by a forest of symbols (notices, warnings, signs, etc.) posted on almost every surface, from the doors of company vehicles to the walls behind toilets in the changing rooms. Most of these messages remind the workers of the hazards specific to the place where they are displayed and the appropriate safety behaviour to be adopted. But they can also indicate no-go areas which cannot be entered without authorisation, or remind workers of the sanctions prescribed for safety offences. A poster at the entrance of Kopala mine, for example, says: ‘Under the influence of alcohol? You will be dismissed!’ To ensure that workers comply with safety rules and procedures, they are constantly monitored by their supervisors and surveillance cameras. They can also be subject to surprise controls by safety officers, who can impose sanctions ranging from simple verbal warning, severe reprimand to dismissal.

However, this political topography is far from homogeneous. Safety communication, control and surveillance tools are particularly concentrated in production sites and along the concession roads, and are less prevalent in offices, canteens or changing rooms. Outside the mining concession itself, the presence of safety is still more diluted and less threatening, taking the form of billboards with a slogan about the importance of safety for the company – here there are no stern declarations of rules or sanctions. Kopala also conducts safety campaigns (role plays, roadshows, etc.) in the communities where the workers live. In 2017, for instance, it organised an essay competition on family safety for miners’ wives and children. The winners received cash prizes, household items and scholarships. As one Kopala mine official explained, ‘We do not want workers to think about safety only when they are at work. We also want their children, the future miners, to understand safety before they come to the plant.’ Thus, the mining company seeks to extend the power of safety beyond the workplace, and to use the workers’ social environment to induce broader changes in their habits (drinking, driving and so forth). As mining companies are keen to point out, safety is not just a set of rules specific to the space of the mine, it is a ‘culture’, a new way of perceiving and being that workers have to embody.

Second, safety is used to impose time discipline on the workers. The presence of cameras in the workplace is officially justified by the need to monitor the production process and make sure that safety conditions are met. But they also serve to keep an eye on miners for non-compliant behaviour such as taking shortcuts, engaging in horseplay or sleeping whilst on duty. At Kopala mine, headlamps and oxygen boxes issued to workers also serve as a form of monitoring. They are allocated individually, instead of being taken from a pool, and each box is equipped with a chip. This chip allows the company to identify the location of every miner and to note the time spent at any given location whilst underground. If these measures are justified for safety reasons (they ensure that all miners come back to the surface alive after their day’s work and if they do not, can trace their exact whereabouts), they also provide the opportunity to better control workers’ movements underground for company officials to quickly detect delays and absenteeism. Since 2017, Kopala mine displayed a timetable for when different categories of miners can access the cage and be issued headlamps and oxygen boxes. Those who fail to meet this timetable must inform control services and ask for permission to access the mine.

Take for instance the experience of Patson, an underground miner. When he reported for work one day in 2018, he was thirty minutes late and the clock-in system did not allow him to enter the mine. To have his access card reconfigured by the IT team, he had to explain the reasons for his delay to his supervisors. After going through the automatic gates, he was again stopped at the mine entrance. The officers there did not let him use the cage because his helmet was not the right colour.2 Miners are assigned helmets of different colours according to their rank and the section of the mine where they work. Specific times during which they can use the cage have been established for these different categories of workers. He had to wait another thirty minutes to get to his workstation. To be sure, Patson will do everything to avoid being in the same situation again. Faced with a highly developed control system, workers are quick to internalise time discipline.

Finally, safety is justified by the need not only to increase workers’ efficiency, but also to preserve the company’s human capital. There is a biopolitical rationale behind safety which leads companies to make a distinction between their direct employees, whose health is monitored and protected, and the people employed by subcontracted firms, whose health is not their direct responsibility. In both mines, these contract employees account for over 70 per cent of the workforce. While Kopala and Kinke provide PPE to all their permanent employees, it is up to the subcontracted firms to provide it for their own employees. Although they have to comply with the mining company’s safety rules, in practice some do not fully provide it, or provide equipment of poor quality.

As a prerequisite to direct employment, both mining companies subject would-be workers to medical checks to determine their suitability. Such medical checks have a long history on both sides of the Central African Copperbelt. What is new is that they are justified by safety reasons, that they are performed regularly on workers, and that they are used to exclude those who are ‘not fit’ from employment. As one Congolese safety officer explained, ‘if a miner cannot see or hear properly, he is very vulnerable to mobile equipment and the dangers of mining’. Far from being limited to eyes and ears, medical checks involve a full examination of the body, and, in Kopala, include tests for sexually transmitted diseases. In both mines, the workers who fail medical checks are liable to receive termination of employment on medical grounds. Their presence in the workplace is viewed as a possible danger to their own safety and to that of others.

Thus, safety should not be understood as the simple continuation of the industrial discipline characteristic of paternalistic labour regimes. The rationale behind its rules, procedures and messages must be sought elsewhere than in the pursuit for ever-increasing efficiency and productivity of workers’ bodies.

Our research suggests two complementary lines of interpretation. On the one hand, the new importance given to safety must be understood in the light of the increasingly capital-intensive nature of the mining industry. Most mines now depend more on machines than on workers. In this context, safety appears as a government technique which must ensure the continuity of production.1 Although the mechanisation of production is a long-standing trend in the Central African Copperbelt, it has not been accompanied by a corresponding development of safety policies. Indeed, these remained almost unchanged since the 1950s. Safety as a key government technique to ensure the continuity of production was introduced by new mining investors in the 2000s. If it does not increase workers’ individual productivity, it increases the productivity of the mine as a whole. From a management point of view, an accident can stop production for several hours, and this lost time represents a greater cost to the company than the money invested in safety equipment and personnel or the time dedicated to safety training and meetings. This link between safety and production – the crude economic rationale behind safety – is made explicit in the precise accounting that contemporary mining companies, including Kopala and Kinke, hold of lost-time injuries and deaths. These figures are displayed everywhere – at the mine’s entrance, in the company’s annual reports, during safety meetings and so forth – to encourage workers to share the company’s concern for production and the creation of value. The value that the company gives to workers’ health, life and well-being is here fused with its own shareholder value.

On the other hand, safety allows the employer to transfer responsibility for accidents onto workers. Regular training, the provision of PPE, the wide range of rules and procedures, the display of safety messages, the establishment of systems of control, collectively remind workers that the company has taken all precautions to guarantee their safety and that it cannot be held responsible for accidents. If an accident occurs, it is generally attributed to workers’ negligence. This is a lesson that Larry, a miner at Kopala, learnt at his own expense. He had repeatedly reported to his superiors that the shovel of the loader he operated was defective. Nothing was done, however, until it injured and killed another miner. The company charged Larry for gross negligence and dismissed him from employment. ‘I don’t know if you have noticed,’ one of his colleagues observed, ‘whenever there is a mine accident, it is always the worker who is at fault.’ Larry’s case is not exceptional. As long as production proceeded it was common for safety officers to turn a blind eye to unsafe practices or to neglect repairs but to punish mineworkers when accidents occurred.

It is in the light of this transfer of responsibility onto the workers that the obligation to refuse to work when safety conditions are not fulfilled must be understood. As we will see in the next section, this obligation is difficult to follow in practice for some workers, especially miners employed by subcontractors. Nevertheless, workers are constantly reminded of it in documentation, during pre-shift safety assessments, or in post-accident reports reviews. This transfer of responsibility for accidents also sheds some light on the obligation to get 100 per cent on safety exams. For example, in 2014, Musonda, participated in a three-month safety training course organised by Kopala mine. It was mandatory for participants to obtain a 100 per cent score before being employed. Those who failed received their certificates only after passing repeat examinations. One of the participants stressed the novelty of this requirement in comparison to the prevailing practice at the time of Zambian Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM): ‘in ZCCM, we just went to sit in classes and listen to the lesson. Today you have to pass an examination.’ The words of an HR employee at Kinke helps to understand the reasoning: ‘The strength of the company is in training workers so that they internalise the safety culture and make it part of their values. We aim to make everyone responsible for their safety and that of others.’

From this, safety may thus be understood as the expression of a neoliberal mode of government. The confusion of market values with moral values, as well as the transfer of responsibility to individuals, have been identified by various scholars as key characteristics of neoliberalism (see, e.g., Rose 1999; Shamir 2008; Trnka and Trundle 2017; Rubbers and Jedlowski 2019). As suggested in Chapter 1, however, it is important to go beyond this concept to develop a more grounded analysis of the labour policies put in place by different mining companies. Two main differences emerge from the comparison between the safety policies of Kopala and Kinke.

First, although both companies operate a zero-tolerance policy to alcohol consumption, Kopala enforce sanctions more strictly and reported more disciplinary cases than Kinke. Between 2013 and 2017, Kopala reported 528 alcohol-related offences. Of these, the company dismissed from employment 219 offenders for exceeding the alcohol limit and issued final warnings to the remainder, whose alcohol levels remained within acceptable limits. Kopala also prohibits the dismissed workers from seeking re-employment there for the next three years. Kopala conducts alcohol tests on accident victims, including those who have died, to rule out the possibility of alcohol consumption.

In contrast, Kinke records very few alcohol-related offences, and dismissals for disciplinary reasons in general are between three and five per year. In addition, while Kopala punished all workers, including contract workers, in case of non-compliance, at Kinke safety officials referred non-compliant workers to their employers. As subcontractors usually have a looser approach to safety, this meant workers received less punitive sanctions, or even no sanction at all.

Second, although the percentage of contract workers is more or less the same in both companies, they do not enjoy the same conditions of employment. Kinke works with a limited number of large and midsized subcontracting firms, which make substantial profits. Such firms offer employment conditions (wages, benefits, etc.) that are slightly lower than those provided by the mining company. By contrast, Kopala puts a large number of small and midsized subcontracting firms in competition with one another to operate its underground mines. To win contracts during tenders, these firms are pressured to make offers with a low price. As they make small profits, many tend to not provide for their workers adequately. This competitive tendering is coupled with a bonus system which ties the profits made by subcontracting firms and the wages of contract workers to their level of production.

As most contract workers receive a very low base salary, this bonus is critical for them to make ends meet at the end of the month. As Collinson’s (1999) and Phakathi’s (2017) work on South Africa show, this type of system pushes miners to take liberties with safety rules and procedures. They are more likely to ignore safety rules to increase production. Worse, if they do not take such risks, they may lose their job. This is what happened to George, an underground miner at Kopala mine. One day, he refused to work in an unsupported area of the underground mine. The following day, his supervisor reassigned him to the surface where there was nothing to do. His colleagues mocked him labelling him ‘Mr Safety’. A week later, he was informed that his contract had expired. He reported this matter to the company safety officers but they could not help. When a contract expires the employer is not under any obligation to renew it. As this example illustrates, although in theory, all workers have a right to refuse dangerous work, in practice contract workers do not enjoy this right.

It is tempting to make sense of the contrasting safety practices at Kopala and Kinke on the basis of the parent company’s investment strategy. Confidentiality clauses do not allow us to say much about those companies here. Suffice it to say that Kopala’s parent company is a private global company that seeks to make short-term profits to increase its shareholder value, while Kinke’s is a Chinese State-Owned Enterprise (SOE) that works with a longer-term perspective (on this contrast, see Lee 2017). In view of Kopala’s capital ownership and investment strategy, it is unsurprising that it puts subcontractors in competition to both raise production and reduce costs without taking responsibility for the consequences of this policy on the safety of contract workers.

But this contrast, we believe, is of lesser significance than the types of mines that Kopala and Kinke operate. While Kinke operates opencast mines, Kopala operates old and deep underground mines that are famous for being particularly wet. As is well known, the risks in underground mines are much higher than in surface mines. This may explain Kopala’s greater insistence on respect of safety rules and procedures by its own employees – its human capital. However, the operating costs of underground mines, including labour costs, are much higher. To make a profit, Kopala tends to focus on the reduction of labour costs, which is the only variable cost category. This pushes the company to outsource its activities to subcontractors on a competitive basis, and to conveniently turn a blind eye to their safety practices.

Indeed, the first thing workers in both countries highlighted is the ubiquity of safety in their everyday lives. Take for instance the underground miners of Kopala. In the company bus, on their way to work, safety is already one of their main subjects of conversation. At the entrance to the mine, they are greeted by safety posters and a self-administered breathalyser before proceeding to the mandatory alcohol test conducted by security officers. After putting on their work clothes, they clock in and collect their headlamps and oxygen boxes. Once they reach the underground office, the pre-shift safety meeting begins. At the stope, each miner has to individually conduct an assessment of the work area for any hazards to be reported or rectified before commencing work. As work proceeds, the supervisor performs targeted observations on every mineworker on safety compliance, skills and technique, posture and PPE. Safety officers also conduct their inspections and supervisions routinely and randomly.

As this example suggests, safety is experienced as both a series of monotonous routines and a pervasive form of control in time and space. It is present when workers work individually, during meetings and informal conversations, as well as when they move from one place to another on the mine site. As some workers told us, this extensive surveillance apparatus expresses the employer’s profound distrust toward workers: ‘When we report for work,’ a miner of Kopala said, ‘they test us for alcohol when at work, they observe everything we do. Maybe they have even put cameras in the toilet. They do not trust us. To them, we are not just workers but drunkards and criminals.’

This impression was reinforced in both mines since employers have implemented double-check mechanisms. At Kopala mine, before the new safety policy, miners recorded all safety incidences in one report book. Since 2017, there has been a book for recording pre-shift meetings which is separate from the one in which assessments are recorded. Safety interventions are recorded in yet another document. Further, when conducting individual assessments, supervisors record their observations on separate forms, while spot checks are also recorded on a separate document. At Kinke, the new safety policy increased the number of required authorisations before specific tasks can be performed. In the past, there was only one office issuing work authorisations. With the new system, each work team has two supervisors, one for the work area and the other for supervising the tasks performed by workers. This double-check mechanism is meant to stop shortcuts and unsafe acts. For many workers, however, this is just more bureaucracy, consuming time and energy at the expense of their work.

Workers in both mines also criticised the employer’s intransigence when it comes to safety, noting that the slightest offence becomes the subject of reprimand and punishment. This is especially the case at Kopala, where the company has the reputation of being unforgiving. As a miner at Kopala put it, ‘when one is found guilty of having alcohol in his breath, he feels stupid. Many are remorseful, but the company does not care.’ At Kinke, the number of dismissals, temporary layoffs, or reprimands for safety reasons is lower. However, the company also has a reputation of inflexibility. Stories about workers dismissed for minor safety offences circulate among workers. Valérie, a female employee, said:

For the workers in Kopala, one of the main means by which their employer controls their behaviour is through video surveillance. Even though the cameras primarily serve to monitor the production process, they also capture any ‘deviant’ behaviour by workers, such as sleeping, horseplay or non-compliance with the regulations. The simple fact that they can be used for this purpose arouses – like Bentham’s panopticon in Foucault (2012 [1975]) – a feeling of being constantly watched. Having said this, surveillance is not understood by workers as an anonymous form of power; it is concretely embodied in the figure of safety officers. At Kopala, they are seen as ‘fault finders’ working in the hands of management: ‘Safety officers,’ a miner said, ‘always side with the bosses to make sure that they find fault in a worker when there is an accident.’ Such ‘traitors’, another miner added, tend to show no empathy towards other workers: ‘They know that sometimes things are difficult in the mine and a person can take a shortcut, but they report you to the bosses. They do not mind that by reporting you to the bosses, you will lose the job and your children will suffer.’ Similar critiques could also be heard on the Congolese side of the border, with some variations across mining projects. At Kinke Pugliese heard a few conversations in which safety officers were presented as being on the side of the employer. At Kishi, another Congolese mine where she did research, the question was less whether safety officers are on the side of the employer than if they treated workers differently, depending on their personal connections with them: ‘we know of someone who reported for work drunk’, a worker of this company told Pugliese, ‘however, being the sole breadwinner in his family and the security officers knowing him, they did not report him. Instead, they sent him home’.

Discourses about safety inevitably led to comments about the unequal treatment of workers by mining companies. At Kinke, workers denounced the impunity of some ‘bosses’ who are seen to be above safety rules and sanctions. They do not wear full PPE, they breach the driving rules, but they are never reprimanded by the safety officers. There are thus double standards in the implementation of safety for executive managers and the bulk of the workforce. At Kopala, comments were more geared towards the inequalities between permanent workers and contract workers. As we have seen above, these two categories of employees do not receive the same PPE. Consequently, most contract workers experience the safety policy with a deep sense of exclusion. As Charles, an underground miner complained, ‘We do the most difficult job, but we feel that we are not needed here. We work with torn gloves, boots and overalls. Look at our friends; they have everything. It is not fair.’ In practice, only the permanent workers enjoy the right to refuse dangerous work. In addition, they can call upon their unions for protection in safety offences. By contrast, as George’s story shows, contract workers cannot refuse dangerous tasks without risking losing their jobs and, since 80 per cent are not unionised, they have no recourse against sanctions by safety officers. Worse still, the production bonus system pushes them to take risks – to operate in unsupported areas, take shortcuts, work without the appropriate equipment, etc. – and to conceal accidents in order to maximise production and increase their insufficient wages.

Mineworkers who experienced the ZCCM or Générale des Carrières et des Mines (Gécamines) era were keen to compare the safety policy of new mining companies with the one that prevailed in the SOEs of the past. Some Congolese workers, for instance, remembered that, at Gécamines, safety training was given to specific categories of workers on the basis of the tasks that they had to perform, and that compliance with safety rules and procedures was the responsibility of supervisors. In new mining companies, by contrast, all the employees must participate in regular safety training, and compliance with safety rules and procedures is regarded as the responsibility of the workers themselves. As their behaviour is subject to different forms of control, it is more difficult for workers who commit offences to seek leniency from their supervisor and to escape sanctions. Similarly, former ZCCM workers referenced the tolerance attached to safety non-compliance: ‘when you failed to obey the rules, they put you under the disciplinary regime but they rarely dismissed you from employment’.

Generally speaking, our respondents contrasted the insistence on safety by new companies with the paternalistic policy of ZCCM and Gécamines in the past. In the discourse of the new mining companies, safety is presented as a generous gift showing that they care for the lives of their employees and the well-being of their families. The workers, on the other hand, oppose these new safety policies, which focus primarily on workers’ biological lives and physical safety, to earlier social policies which covered every aspect of the lives and well-being of workers and their families.

From this perspective, safety campaigns serve as bitter reminders of the difficulties caused by the withdrawal of social welfare, the mass layoffs, the rise of subcontracting and the low wages paid to mineworkers. In the Zambian mining community where Kopala mine conducted its safety campaigns, many residents perceive safety to be meaningless when people have no access to jobs or social welfare. As one argued:

One can find in this critique of safety the expression of a paternalistic moral economy, that is, a set of expectations towards employers that have to do with the subsistence of workers and which takes as a standard the social policies of previous mining companies (Rubbers 2010; see Thompson 1971; Scott 1977). The new investors are criticised for breaking with the concern of their predecessors, ZCCM and Gécamines, for workers’ social life and reducing it to a concern for their biological life. To use Agamben’s conceptual distinction (1998), while paternalism allowed them to aspire to a certain conception of the good life (bios, or the life worth living), safety reduces their prospects to mere physical existence (zoë, or bare life).

Safety in the twenty-first century is however grounded in a different power rationality than the paternalistic policies that preceded it. It reflects the increasingly capital-intensive nature of the mining industry, which is based less on the productivity of workers individually than on the productivity of the mine as a whole. In these circumstances, workers’ primary responsibility is not to increase their own efficiency but to ensure that the production process is not halted. Safety also reflects a new corporate strategy that aims to transfer responsibility for work accidents to the workers themselves. What the safety discourse does is to make the mining project’s various stakeholders understand that accidents are the responsibility of the workers, not of the company.

If the same neoliberal power rationality underlies the safety policies of contemporary mining companies, it is important to account for the different ways in which such policies are implemented. Our comparison between Kopala in Zambia and Kinke in Congo shows significant variations in their safety policies, and suggests that these variations can be understood in the light of their labour management practices, the type of mine being operated, and the type of investor behind them. If a general conclusion can be drawn from this comparison, it is that safety policies are likely to be more flexible and less discriminatory in opencast mines operated by mining companies investing with a longer-term perspective.

In a sense, workers’ comments allow light to be shed on the dynamics behind the safety policies which emerged in the Central African Copperbelt as foreign mining investors succeeded the large SOEs of the past. From their perspective, the importance given to procedures, surveillance and sanctions reveals the distrust of management towards workers while the discrimination mining companies practice between different categories of employees suggests that they do not value the latters’ lives equally. The ways in which safety measures are implemented contribute to the emergence of new types of inequalities in the workplace that were absent under state paternalism. Above all, in comparison to the social policies that were developed by mining companies in both copperbelts (from the 1920s to the 1980s), the safety policies of new mining investors are grounded in a narrow conception of care and protection, which reduces workers’ lives to mere physical existence, as if their own conception of the good life has no importance.