Conclusion: Beyond the Neoliberal Labour Regime

As explained in the first chapter, these trends point to the emergence of a neoliberal labour regime, which can be associated with other general characteristics of mining projects in the twenty-first century, such as their tendency to operate within securitised enclaves and the development of Corporate Social Responsibility programmes. Far from being specific to the Central African Copperbelt, the characteristics of this labour regime can be found in most mining projects in the Global South. Indeed, this regime results from three main processes which have affected the mining sector as a whole. First, it is a response to the slow depletion of high-grade deposits since the nineteenth century, which has pushed mining corporations to search for ever larger and poorer deposits globally. Over the course of the twentieth century, mining and processing became increasingly mechanised, the number of workers in the industry was progressively reduced, and labour costs were cut all round – a process that primarily impacted the least skilled workers (Schmitz 2000). Secondly, because of the escalation of production costs, mining companies increasingly depended on financial markets to start or develop mining projects. Since the 1990s, the financial institutions willing to lend capital for risky mining ventures in the Global South have tended to demand high returns in the short term. The characteristic features of the neoliberal labour regime – starting with increasing job insecurity – can thus be associated with the rise of the shareholder value and lean management models among listed firms since the 1990s (Aglietta and Reberioux 2005; Ho 2009). Finally, this labour regime must be understood in the light of the neoliberal reforms that most countries in the Global South implemented under pressure from international financial institutions in the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms have provided foreign investors with favourable conditions for developing flexible labour practices: pro-employer laws, under-resourced labour administrations, weakened trade unions and, most importantly, a labour reserve army ready to work in the mining industry for low wages (see Standing 1997, 1999, 2001).

In many ways, this neoliberal labour regime breaks with the state paternalism characteristic of the heyday of Gécamines and ZCCM. The management of new mining companies do not hesitate to take credit for this break. In their view, paternalism was responsible for the decline of the two state-owned companies; in the neoliberal era, cutting labour costs is nothing less than a matter of survival. Although new mining investors develop CSR programmes, such programmes contrast with twentieth century paternalism in at least two respects. First, their main target is less the company’s own workforce than local communities.1 Of course, members of local communities may also be part of the workforce of mining companies. This is especially the case in remote rural areas, where mining companies’ social programmes generally include the creation of jobs for the benefit of local communities. As mentioned in Chapter 1, however, these ‘local’ workers remain few in number, and most of them are at the bottom of the company hierarchy. A striking example is the message that Mopani in Zambia sent to its employees in November 2015, announcing the dismissal of 4,300 workers. In the message, this dismissal is first presented as a necessary measure to ensure the company’s viability, and as a measure that is comparatively favourable to the workers, since management had initially envisaged retrenching more than 6,500 workers. Later in the same message, however, the company provides the assurance that it will continue its CSR programme in local communities – a programme in which it claims to invest millions each year. Second, when it comes to workers, mining companies’ CSR programmes focus almost exclusively on health and safety (Rajak 2011). As James Musonda and Francesca Pugliese suggest in Chapter 2, if mining companies continue to care for workers’ lives, their care practices are largely reduced to biological life (zoë), to the exclusion of any consideration for workers’ own conceptions of the good life (bios) (on this distinction, see Agamben 1998). This politics of life contrasts with the social policies developed by ZCCM and Gécamines in the second half of the twentieth century, which encompassed most aspects of the existence of workers. They did not simply aim to make workers live, but to reform their subjectivities – that is, the way they constitute themselves as ethical subjects in their relationship to others (Rubbers 2013). In doing so, although imperfectly, they allowed them to develop a ‘modern’ lifestyle, corresponding to what the workers themselves saw as a life worth living (Ferguson 1999).

First, on the basis of research in the Zambian copperbelt, Lee (2017) shows that NFCA, a Chinese SOE, offers to its workers more stable jobs but lower wages than Konkola and Mopani, two global private companies. Moreover, instead of putting subcontractors in competition for operating the mine, it works on a long-term basis with a single subcontractor, who provides conditions of employment similar to the mining company. For Lee, this different ‘labour bargain’ is to be interpreted through the imperatives to which both types of companies are confronted. While global private capital is driven by the imperative of short-term shareholder value maximisation, Chinese state capital is subjected to various economic, strategic and diplomatic imperatives. Such imperatives lead NFCA to develop its activities in a longer-term perspective and to be more sensitive to political pressures. When confronted to (repeated) strikes and (strong) pressures from the government, it has been more willing to make concessions than Konkola and Mopani.

The comparison that Thomas McNamara and Kristien Geenen make between ChinMin, another CNMC’s subsidiary, and Sino-Congolaise des Mines (Sicomines) in Chapter 5 supports this analysis, even though the Sicomines project in Congo entered into the production phase more recently and has been subjected to less political pressure than NFCA and ChinMin in Zambia. On the basis of a case study, I have highlighted elsewhere the existence of a third scenario in Congo, that of mining projects developed by global private companies, and then bought out by Chinese SOEs (Rubbers 2020a). Such projects seem to provide better employment conditions that those initially developed by global private or Chinese SOEs. As they take control of operational mines, the new Chinese owners retain the terms of employment established by their predecessor. The wages in these companies are thus within the range of those offered by global private companies, approximatively 30 per cent above those in projects run by Chinese SOEs. At the same time, as they benefit from state funding, they generally have the opportunity to provide more stable jobs than private global companies which strive to maximise short-term profits for their shareholders.

Second, the three companies studied by Lee (2017) operate (old) underground mines in Zambia’s Copperbelt Province. From management’s point of view, the best means to increase productivity in such mines is either to reduce workers’ wages to the greatest extent possible (NFCA’s choice), or to hire several subcontractors and to spark competition among them through a production bonus scheme (Konkola’s and Mopani’s choice). In contrast, most mining companies in Congo, as well as those established in North-Western Province of Zambia, operate opencast mines. Productivity in such mines is, above all, a function of the size of the fleet of mining vehicles, their loading capacity and the traffic flow in the pit. As a result, whether public or private, companies operating opencast mines tend to prefer working with a limited number of large, reliable, subcontracting firms that offer more or less equivalent conditions of employment to mining companies.

Third, and finally, the refusal to take over existing social infrastructure, or to develop new ones, does not only depend on capital’s requirements, but also on the availability of housing and social infrastructure near the mines (Rubbers 2019a). When the mine is near a large urban centre, mining companies can pay their workers a housing allowance to arrange their own accommodation. Mining projects in remote rural areas, on the other hand, have to build camps to house their workers. The most striking case is perhaps Kalumbila, in North-Western Province (Zambia), where First Quantum has built a new ‘company town’ with hundreds of houses as well as schools and sport facilities. Like the mining companies of the colonial period, its aim was to attract skilled and experienced miners from Copperbelt Province, 300 km from Kalumbila, and to ‘stabilise’ them in this remote rural location by providing them with the necessary infrastructure to develop a ‘modern’ family life. In contrast to the mining companies of the past, however, First Quantum does not house the workers: the houses are for rent and purchase, which generates some dissatisfaction among workers who would have preferred to invest in the towns of Copperbelt Province. Consequently, it is they who, in their view, will eventually bear the cost of the new model town built by the company, as it is likely to become a ‘ghost town’ once First Quantum leaves the country.

It is often these local actors who have to manage with the multiple contradictions generated by the new labour regime on a day-to-day basis: for mineworkers at the rock face, it is the contradiction between the pressure to increase production and compliance with safety rules; for women working in mining, the contradiction between the implementation of gender equality programmes and the various forms of everyday discrimination imposed upon them in the workplace; for trade unionists, the contradiction between their promise to obtain better employment conditions during elections and the importance to preserve workers’ jobs during negotiations; for HR managers, the contradiction between the decisions made by expatriate management and their consequences for the national workforce of which they are part. In each of these cases, the practical solutions that local actors find to overcome contradictions have consequences on their life: some workers do not report minor injuries; some women have to walk kilometres wearing oversized shoes every day; some trade unionists lose their fellow workers’ trust; some HR managers are the subject of slander in the community and receive threatening anonymous letters from workers. In many ways, however, this is a game these local actors cannot not play, at least if they do not want to end up losing their jobs (Finn 1998: 219).

Although it takes place in a field of significant constraints, the agency of workers, trade unionists and HR managers contributes to shape mining companies’ labour strategies. They play a significant role in recruitment practices, the negotiation of wages and benefits, the improvement of working conditions, compliance of companies with labour laws, and the organisation of mass layoffs. However, the case studies we carried out show that the margin for negotiation of local actors not only varies from one domain to the next, but also from one mining project to another. The micropolitics of work do not take the same form or have the same effect in the different types of mining project identified above.

Such variations are well illustrated in the two chapters by Pugliese and Musonda. In the chapter on safety, they show that new rules and procedures have been imposed by foreign investors in this domain without leaving much room for workers to change them formally. But the way in which workers put them into practice differs between the two mines under study, one being an opencast mine and the other an underground mine. In the underground mine in Zambia, contract workers have to circumvent safety rules and procedures informally if they want to meet their production targets and get a bonus at the end of the month, while in the opencast mine in Congo, where the production bonus is less significant or non-existent, workers have no interest – except for their personal convenience – in deviating from safety rules and procedures. In the chapter on gender, on the other hand, Pugliese and Musonda’s analysis suggests that gender equality initiatives by the parent company headquarters have had only a marginal effect locally. The main reason is that the people responsible for recruiting and promoting workers, who are generally Congolese or Zambian men, are still reluctant to hire women in the core departments of the mine – that is, mining, processing and maintenance. If the recent boom has represented a missed opportunity to introduce more gender equality in the mining sector, this is to a large extent due to the power games involved in the recruitment and promotion practices, the changes that have taken place in the contribution of women in household revenues, and the gender stereotypes prevailing in the two copperbelts.

Having said this, the negotiation margin of local actors also changes over time. Chapter 6 on HR managers suggests that, for various reasons, this ‘band of flexibility’ tends to shrink with the development of mining projects. Indeed, once a mining project starts production, it only has a limited number of skilled workers, and the parent company tends to exert tighter control over its operating costs. In the Central African Copperbelt, the development of new mining projects has been furthermore marked by two recent economic downturns – following the financial crisis in 2008–10, and during the decline in copper prices in 2011–16 – which led investors to rationalise the management of mining projects and to cut labour costs. This lean management strategy has considerably narrowed the room for manoeuvre available to HR managers, but also to other local actors (trade unionists, customary chiefs, workers, etc.) in the making of mining projects’ labour practices.

Outside of the union power field, various actors in the political arena have seized on the issue of employment in the mining sector (job and contract opportunities, access to managerial positions, wages and working conditions, mass layoffs, etc.) to extend their support base and impose themselves as essential interlocutors between local people and foreign investors. Such practices – which could be compared to what Benda-Beckman (1981) calls ‘shopping forums’ – have led in both countries to a resurgence of local, provincial and/or national identity politics in the past fifteen years. In Zambia, employment in the mining sector was one of the key electoral campaign issues that led to the rise of the governing party, Michael Sata’s Patriotic Front, which found a strong support base in Copperbelt Province. Given the political weight of mineworkers in this province, the party leaders are sensitive to their demands and, as the chapter on strikes shows, do not hesitate to intervene in labour disputes on their behalf.

In Congo, mineworkers do not have comparable influence, whether in the provincial or in the national political arena, which are more strongly organised along ethnic/provincial lines. This does not mean, of course, that ethnic and provincial identities have no significance in Zambia, especially in North-Western Province, but they do not constitute a political resource as powerful as in Congo, where they have provided a basis for mass violence on several occasions since independence. Over the past twenty years, the establishment of new mining companies, and then the découpage (that is, the partition) of Katanga into four smaller provinces in 2015 has stirred growing ethnic competition for jobs and power positions in the mining sector and the state administration. In this context, new mining companies are under increasing pressure from all sides to provide jobs to the ethnic groups autochthonous to the area or province where they are established (Rubbers 2019b).

This growing political competition must be understood in the light of the inequalities that the establishment of new mining companies has helped engender and exacerbate in the two copperbelts. Contrary to what studies focusing on the dispossession of local communities by foreign corporations suggest, the recent boom of mining investments in the Central African Copperbelt has not resulted in a simple division between winners and losers. As in several other mining contexts in the Global South, the recruiting practices of foreign investors have resulted in what Hecht (2002: 699; see also Welker 2014: 81; Golub 2014: 5–6) has called an ‘ethnotechnical hierarchy’, with expatriate executives and specialised technicians at the top, skilled employees from the country’s major cities in the middle, and the local unskilled workers at the bottom. At the same time, the development of subcontracting in the mining industry has led to the emergence of a class of small and midsized entrepreneurs and the formation of a large secondary labour market associated with precarious jobs and low wages. Finally, the consumption practices of these various categories of workers and entrepreneurs has had a significant effect on various sectors (construction, transport, food, schools, bars, etc.) with their own labour dynamics.

Labour can thus be fruitfully used as an entry point for analysing the class inequalities engendered by the mining boom (Wright 1997; see Rubbers 2019b). This analysis needs however to be complemented by a broader study of the social trajectories of various categories of people, which would examine in more detail their social mobility strategies and the role played by attributes such as age, gender, or ethnicity (Noret 2020; see Rubbers 2020b). Such an approach would enable a more comprehensive understanding of how new mining investments have transformed the social space of the two copperbelts.

My answer was not very original. I simply explained that our aim was to describe what is going on and try to understand why, not to tell people what should be done. There is no necessary link between the two, and it is the responsibility of Congolese and Zambian people to decide about their future. In other words, I gave the kind of answer that most social scientists give when confronted by such requests. The aim of social science research is to produce empirical and critical knowledge about historical processes. This knowledge can help people to better understand their situation, and in doing so, allow them to make informed decisions about their future, but it does not in itself grant the researcher the authority to make policy recommendations.

Since then, the dissatisfaction this flip answer aroused among my interlocutors has led me to reflect further on the issue. In one way or another, a social science researcher should respond to the concerns of research participants who wait for possible solutions to the problems they are confronted by in everyday life. Even without making recommendations, I could have opened up the debate on the range of possibilities offered to my interlocutors by sharing and discussing some of the ideas expressed by research participants in the course of our investigation: for instance, to organise the negotiation of a collective agreement at industry level, which would set minimum wages and benefits for different categories of workers, cost-of-living increases, maximum working hours, the number of permitted day leaves and so forth; to relax the procedures for organising legal strikes and empowering unions in wage negotiations; to tighten mass layoff procedures by conditioning such measures on an independent financial audit and the organisation of a social compensation plan; to set a minimum percentage for the permanent workforce and to impose strict rules regarding the employment of contract workers; to fight against various forms of discrimination by establishing a clear legal framework in favour of nationals, women and local communities; to make legal action against mining companies more accessible, fair and effective for workers and unions; to make the mining industry more transparent about their labour practices by forcing companies to provide information and authorise external controls; and to institute stiff penalties for non-compliance with established rules.

Even though they would not necessarily lead to a return of state paternalism similar to that of ZCCM or Gécamines in the past, all these ideas have in common a call for greater control of mining companies’ labour practices by the state and better protections for mineworkers. Far from expressing fantasies disconnected from their everyday experience, they also call for practical solutions that lie within the reach of the Congolese and Zambian governments. After all, since the beginning of the mining boom in the 2000s, both states have taken initiatives to regain control over the distribution of mining revenues, and no longer hesitate to take radical measures to force the hand of foreign investors such as suspending their contracts, suing them in court, or withdrawing their mining licences. To be sure, these initiatives and measures were not taken on the sole initiative of governments (rather, they were taken in response to the pressure of civil society organisations and to gain the support of the electorate), and they gave rise to tough and lengthy negotiations. In some cases, political leaders gave in to the threats of mining companies; in others, they made unilateral decisions that turned out to have adverse consequences. Such jolts, however, should not hide the trend that is emerging. Since the financial crisis of 2008, there has been – to use Balandier’s (1971 [1955]) expression – a ‘resumption of initiative’ (reprise d’initiative) by the Congolese and Zambian governments in the regulation of the mining sector.

For now, these political initiatives are limited to regaining control over the distribution of mining revenues. In the domain of labour, notwithstanding the superficial changes they have brought into the law, the only actions political leaders have taken are to intervene with mining companies conducting mass layoffs in an attempt to save jobs. Little has been done to sustainably improve conditions of employment that might align with the ideas above – i.e. to strengthen the bargaining power of unions, to tighten mass layoff procedures, to limit the negative effects of subcontracting practices, or to fight discrimination in the labour market. Yet, to escape the neoliberal labour regime that we have attempted to characterise in this book, it is necessary to move the debate on mining investments beyond tax issues, and to refocus it on labour and conditions of employment. If there is anything we have learned from our research, it is that, far from having become marginal, this issue remains at the heart of people’s concerns in the Central African Copperbelt.