Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism

Precarity, Class and the Neoliberal Subject

Chris Hann, Jonathan Parry, Chris Hann, Jonathan Parry

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785336799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together ethnographic case studies of industrial labor from different parts of the world, Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism explores the increasing casualization of workforces and the weakening power of organized labor. This division owes much to state policies and is reflected in local understandings of class. By exploring this relationship, these essays question the claim that neoliberal ideology has become the new 'commonsense' of our times and suggest various propositions about the conditions that create employment regimes based on flexible labor.

1

Varieties of Capital, Fracture of Labor

A Comparative Ethnography of Subcontracting and Labor Precarity on the Zambian Copperbelt

CHING KWAN LEE

Mines a thousand meters deep are unforgiving places. My ethnographic fieldwork in the mines began in October 2012 at the Chambishi mine, now owned by the Chinese state company Nonferrous Metal China, Africa (NFCA). As I shadowed safety officers and maintenance engineers to observe how miners work underground, I found myself utterly unprepared for the oppressive humidity, high temperatures, deafening noise, and pervasive, disorienting darkness. Trekking across uneven, muddy terrains and walking through sometimes knee-deep waters, I struggled to keep my balance and capture my share of the inadequate circulation of oxygen, all the while sweating profusely like everyone else. Sometimes between shifts, right after blasting, dusty, smoky air would move across dark and rugged rocks hanging over a stope ten meters wide that looked like a bottomless dark hole. If Hell existed, this would be it, I said to myself. I had no other vocabulary for this world.

On one of my first few trips down, after more than an hour at a particularly suffocating corner at level 826 meter, I felt as if my lungs had collapsed and stuck together: no air went in, no matter how hard I breathed. I told my colleagues that I would faint if I had to be there another five minutes and implored them to bring me up to the surface immediately, which they graciously did. Even as my lungs recovered, I felt deflated as a fieldworker. Later, when I moved on to the depths of two other mines in this study, Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) and Mopani Copper Mines (MCM)—both owned by London-listed multinationals—I was not only more acclimatized, but also aware that other underground mines were as hot, dark, and dangerous as the Chinese one. The Copperbelt made my old stomping grounds—factories in the sunbelt and the rustbelt of China—look like decent workplaces.

Like the miners, I sometimes forgot which mine I was in, once I went underground. And like me, the miners described their daily work in different mines as harsh, dangerous, and demoralizing. Derek Chanda, a miner at NFCA, joined the industry expecting more money because he knew it involved harder work. He began as a general worker and two years later was trained to drive a locomotive carrying copper ore; then, after another three years, he was promoted to PIC (person-in-charge). Now, after eight years, he is a shift boss at 700 meters:

The underground is very risky and hostile, full of dangerous elements. At any moment, you face death, like from rock fall. I’ve seen many accidents. Previously almost every week, someone would be injured in the arm, legs or shoulders. Hard hats have no use when huge rocks fall. They have put in place more safety measures since 2010 … It’s so hot that it is like a grill, an oven. The ventilation is very poor; people feel weak because they cannot breathe well. Like someone has run a long distance. Fainting is common. Air is saturated with gases from the rocks, exhaust air from the trucks, and the dust from the boomer. For facing so many risks every day, we only get peanuts at the end of the month.”¹

MCM’s underground is no better than that at NFCA. Victor Chilesite, a contract worker who has worked in different mines, highlighted the pressure to work hard, on top of the physically oppressive environment:

It’s slave-like condition… If you don’t drink water, you’d pass out. MCM has safety standards but it gives contractors meters and the contractors only care about meeting the targets. There is a lot of pressure on the workers to meet the target but there are lots of problems everyday: waiting for machines to get repaired, congestion underground, or the machines are too hot and we have to stop for them to cool down. In an hour I can barely make one trip but the target is 10 trips a shift. The supervisors (section boss, shift boss, mine captain) keep shouting at you, ‘tomorrow don’t go down the mine’, threatening to suspend me, when I don’t make the target.

Despite doing physically strenuous work for hours on end, most miners did not eat during their shift underground. Following an industry-wide tradition, the mines issued miners two pieces of mine bread, or kampompo in Bemba, before they go down. Some companies provided a monthly ration of sugar, cacao, or tea leaves, if the unions managed to include these in their collective agreements. Still, with no official lunch break and only demanding production targets to meet, many would eat at home and save the kampompo for their children or spouse. Miners with pocket money to spare would buy soft drinks at the tuck shop near the change house, but many simply put sugar in their own water bottle, shook it, and used this sweet water as their source of energy for the day. With time, as they came to realize, their bodies got used to feeling hungry. An electrician at NFCA explained:

Many people don’t eat underground because the air is too bad. You’ll get stomach ache if you eat in all the foul air. I either eat before I go down or after I come up. I feel hungry but I am used to it. A few people eat underground, but you have to find your own time. There is no official lunch break. Hygiene is generally bad underground because people urinate anywhere, and some even defecate at crosscuts [areas that are closed off after production is finished]. They are not supposed to but they do it anyway. You will be fired instantly if you are caught. The cotton masks they give us are not good enough for filtering the soot. It’s always black when you take them off at the end of the shift. It’s so hot underground that when supervisors are not around miners look for places where there is a bit of cool air or cool water dripping from the rocks.

The same is true of KCM’s Nchanga underground, according to a 28-year-old contract scrapper driver:

We spend 45 minutes walking from the man cage to the work area, and another 45 minutes back at the end of the shift. It’s far away. We eat before going underground because there is no break for eating. Some people eat at the gathering area during the five-minute safety talk at the beginning of the shift. Toilets are so far away, near the haulage areas, it takes 30 minutes to get to. So people take a leak where they are when no one is around. If a supervisor caught you, you can be instantly fired. This is serious because airflow is bad enough here as it is.

Political, Legal, Technological, and Racial Disempowerment of Labor

Today, the degradation of work on the Copperbelt, where a multiplicity of foreign investors own and run different major mines, can be traced to four decades of disempowerment by both Zambian state policy and international financial institutions’ imposition of structural adjustment. Despite having been a significant force in the struggle for national liberation, organized labor succumbed to the ruling United National Independence Party’s corporatist control in the post-independence era. In the name of the national interest, Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda, declared strikes illegal but offered miners paternalism in the form of a “cradle-to-grave” welfare system that subsidized “diapers and burials,” food, and housing. When copper prices collapsed after the mid 1970s, the IMF met workers’ demands for wage increases and subsidies with staunch resistance. By the late 1980s, the trade union, increasingly alienated from the ruling party, led a society-wide resistance to adjustment and austerity, eventually bringing the union leader Frederick Chiluba to power and ushering in multi-party democracy with the promise of rolling back neoliberalism. President Chiluba then reversed his position and became an ardent supporter of privatization, famously asking workers to “die a little” to revitalize the national economy. It was during Chiluba’s reign in the 1990s that labor law reform, part of loan conditionality, laid the framework for today’s production regime (Larmer 2007). In one revision after another, the Zambian labor code declared sympathy strikes illegal, splintered the trade union movement, removed the compulsoriness of industry-level collective bargaining, and deregulated the labor market by changing the definition of “casual worker” so that it allowed for a longer duration of casual jobs. Together, these neoliberalization measures accomplished what Marxists would call “primitive accumulation”—subjecting noncapitalist labor and assets to the logic of capitalist profit making—well before Chinese and non-Chinese investors arrived. The past decade has not seen any reversal in the declining power of organized labor, even with the election of the populist president Michael Sata and his pro-poor economic policies.

Along with Zambian laws and politics, global standards for the production technologies and labor processes of mining and construction have also undermined the workplace bargaining power of workers across sectors and investors. With privatization and new investors came mechanization of the mines. Turning away from the extensive use of manual underground labor typical of the late 1960s, the mines in this study have all brought in American and Swedish heavy equipment (brands such as Caterpillar, Sandvik, and Atlas Copco) to achieve higher levels of productivity. Today, the most common underground sight is no longer miners drilling with jackhammers, but operators and drivers mobilizing large boomers, loaders, and dump trucks. Workers have become highly replaceable, though the labor process of mining has not changed: it consists mainly of drilling and blasting for primary and secondary development (i.e., digging new seams to access the ore), stope drilling and blasting for production (extracting the ore), lashing (moving the ore to a tip), and crushing and transporting the ore to the concentrator for processing (extracting copper from the ore). The worldwide trend has been to use subcontractors, who for their part offer only minimal training to short-term contract workers.

Another striking similarity among foreign-owned workplaces is the “colored” glass ceiling. Expatriates dominate senior management in all foreign companies in mining, accounting for 5–10 percent of a company’s workforce. Despite widespread rumors, scholarly research has not found any empirical evidence to substantiate the claim that Chinese companies bring their own manual workers rather than hiring local Africans. Strictly speaking, the “color bar” principle (i.e., that no white man should be subordinate to a Zambian) that prevailed in the colonial period is no longer upheld. Still, though, an invisible glass ceiling that is operative to varying degrees ensures that Zambians rarely number among the “chiefs” (chief executive officer, chief production officer, chief operation officer, chief financial officer, etc.). Under Zambian regulations, the human resource manager has to be a Zambian; this is often the highest position held by Zambians at the corporate level. Racial subordination of Zambian managers and professionals is a muted issue today because these employees, who lack collective representation, must resort to individualist strategies for moving ahead on the corporate ladder and therefore are often seen as suspect in the eyes of the Zambian rank-and-file workers in most mines. On the other hand, workers and unions alike agree that companies aggressively discipline expatriates for any racist remarks and demeanors, so interpersonal racism is not a salient problem.

Beneath these similarities in the political, technological, and racial apparatus of production, the three mines differ significantly in the way they do mining. Chinese state capital’s interest in long-term, stable production of copper ores, as part of a complex set of imperatives beyond profit maximization, is manifested in the way NFCA invests in exploration, drills for mineable reserves, and makes everyday production decisions. Its peculiarity can only be seen in contrast to the other two mines, driven by what Zambian mining experts call the “trader mentality,” in which copper is traded for short-term profit. MCM’s parent company Glencore is the world’s leading commodity trader, and KCM’s parent company Vedanta sees processing (smelting and refining), rather than mining, as its most important profit stream (Lee 2014). Here, I will focus on their adoption of different approaches to subcontracting.

Contract Mining

While all three mines subcontracted mining to cut costs, the much greater financial pressure on KCM and MCM to deliver profit to shareholders drove them to maintain a much larger pool of subcontractors than NFCA’s. KCM was particularly notorious for ruthlessly using competition among subcontractors to drive down costs, so much that an internal critical discourse arose among its own managers about the “tyranny of finance.” It referred to the Commercial Department’s supreme power, overriding that of Operation, to make production decisions (e.g., the purchase of machinery and choice of subcontractors). Though its subcontracting method was based more on performance than cost, MCM resembled KCM in the large extent of its subcontracting. In contrast, NFCA has for the sake of stability used only one mining subcontractor, also from China, since production started in 2003. Some senior managers at MCM attributed this trend to the merger of its parent company, Glencore, a global trader, with Xstrata, a mining major. That is, MCM now stands midway between the producer mentality of NFCA and the trader mentality of KCM. The difference in their practice of subcontracting was literally visible—the presence of large numbers of subcontractors at KCM and MCM made their mines more colorful than NFCA’s. The variegated colors of uniforms worn by subcontractors’ workers—red, orange, blue, green, and brown, mixed in with the white overalls of KCM and MCM—contrasted sharply with the unvarying army green of NFCA uniforms and the worker’s blue of its single subcontractor, JCHX.

The CEO of KCM traced the origin of subcontracting to privatization, but it intensified after 2008:

From 2000 on, you had the start of a transition to contract mining. Then, with the 2008 meltdown, we began what people call “extensive” outsourcing. It’s a matter of survival. We did not have money to buy new machinery for the open pit, for example, so we decided to subcontract to other people who bring in the capital and equipment. It’s a matter of capital allocation, to have time and money for core competences. We subcontract primary and secondary development, but production we do it ourselves. We will never outsource processing, the smelter…Subcontracting is here to stay. Mechanization will increase and labor will come down by 20–30% over the next 5 years.

The main attraction of contractors was that they were cheaper than employees—about 20 percent less—because of overheads involved in directly employing people, according to a production manager at Nchanga. But from the perspective of those in production, what made KCM’s use of subcontractors problematic was the price competition the company used to select subcontractors. The head of the Commercial Department explained to me that he normally negotiated with two finalists, using each of them as leverage to drive down the other’s cost. Trying to contain his frustration and anger, the Nchanga assistant mine manager complained about the “tyranny of Commercial” at KCM: “A lot of times Commercial drives down the price so hard that they actually bring down the contractors. I cannot reject the contractors Commercial picked just based on price. A good portion of them have failed mid-way and they affect me in production. So in the end you are not saving at all.”

In 2012/13, for instance, KCM’s Nchanga Underground mine used twenty-eight subcontractors to undertake a wide range of tasks in its labor-intensive Lower Ore Body: production scrapping, secondary development, lashing, steel support, tramming, long hole drilling, track and haulage maintenance. Of these subcontractors, 98 percent were local businesses owned by former miners and people unrelated to mining such as teachers, civil servants, and traders. Upper Ore body was highly mechanized and engaged subcontractors who were more capitalized and mechanized. They came from Chile, Peru, and South Africa.

Nobody understood the problems subcontracting inflicted on mining production better than one KCM manager who had been “rehired” after his retirement to solve problems created by subcontractors. Attending one of the production meetings between this KCM manager and its subcontractors was like watching him teach a management course to a group who did not know the basics. Subcontractors were paid at a piece rate per cubic meter; some of them brought their own machines, while others just brought labor. Because their profit margin was low, not more than 5 percent, they could easily go under and could offer only low wages to their staff. The quality of their frontline supervision (site manager, mine captain, section boss) and the morale of labor were therefore always low. At the beginning of the month after employees collected their wages, absenteeism was so intractable that the only solution the KCM manager could find to reduce its impact on KCM was to schedule a mandatory KCM “men to rest” holiday at that time. He and his colleagues were resigned to the fact that low motivation would persist as long as indirect workers were paid some 40 percent less than KCM’s direct workers, with whom they worked side by side. Other common problems concerned contractors’ delaying of payment to their own workers, which triggered a downing of tools that necessarily disrupted KCM’s own production schedule. Contractors offered terms of employment, some providing kampompo, PPE (personal protective equipment), and housing allowances, and some not, to workers who practically were doing the same jobs. Turnover was very high, creating gaps in labor supply, especially for jobs that many young Zambians—the “digital kids,” as the KCM manager called them—found too tough on arrival at the minesite.

Down the road, MCM also used a large number of subcontractors, despite having moved away from cutthroat competitive subcontracting toward adoption of a performance principle of awarding contracts. As at KCM’s Nchanga minesite, at MCM’s Nkana minesite each of the three shafts engaged about twenty subcontractors to do charging and blasting, long hole drilling, diamond drilling, grouting, maintenance of rails, de-sludging of water, and so forth. Coordination among contractors was a key problem that arose every day and was brought into bold relief at the daily 6 a.m. production meeting with the underground mine manager’s office. Which contractor should be responsible for the prior day’s shortfall in production was a question that usually sparked a lot of heated argument.

Like the CEO of KCM, a board director at MCM who had worked from 1975 to 2000 at ZCCM (the Zambian state-owned company before privatization), also recognized that subcontracting, even though it has been an immediate solution to the problem of capital shortage, was still less than ideal.

The ideal is to do everything ourselves… Under ZCCM there was little subcontracting. By the time of privatization, development was at our nose because there was no working capital to bring in equipment. After privatization, MCM brought in contractors who were capable of bringing capital and equipment. 50% of development was contracted out. But they are under our management. Production and processing is 100% in house. The cost of a direct labor is twice as much as an indirect labor. It’s a matter of lesser unit cost of production [the overhead cost—pension, medical, school—is just too much and will eliminate any increase in efficiency in productivity] But contracting is not efficient and a big headache. For instance, when a contractor has the machine to develop an end ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction. Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject
• Chapter 1. Varieties of Capital, Fracture of Labor: A Comparative Ethnography of Subcontracting and Labor Precarity on the Zambian Copperbelt
• Chapter 2. Miners and Their Children: The Remaking of the Soviet Working Class in Kazakhstan
• Chapter 3. Work, Precarity, and Resistance: Company and Contract Labor in Kazakhstan’s Former Soviet Steel Town
• Chapter 4. Regular Work in Decline, Precarious Households, and Changing Solidarities in Bulgaria
• Chapter 5. Precarious Labor and Precarious Livelihoods in an Indian Company Town
• Chapter 6. Regimes of Precarity: Buruh, Karyawan, and the Politics of Labor Identity in Indonesia
• Chapter 7. Between God and the State: Class, Precarity, and Cosmology on the Margins of an Egyptian Steel Town
• Chapter 8. The (Un-)Making of Labor: Capitalist Accelerations and Their Human Toll at a South Korean Shipyard in the Philippines
• Chapter 9. Relative Precarity: Decline, Hope, and the Politics of Work
• Chapter 10. From Avtoritet and Autonomy to Self-Exploitation in the Russian Automotive Industry
• Chapter 11. Precarity, Guanxi, and the Informal Economy of Peasant Workers in Contemporary China
• Chapter 12. From Dispossessed Factory Workers to “Micro-entrepreneurs”: The Precariousness of Employment in Trinidad’s Garment Sector
• Chapter 13. Towards a Political Economy of Skill and Garment Work: The Case of the Tiruppur Industrial Cluster in South India
• Chapter 14. From Casual to Permanent Work: Maoist Unionists and the Regularization of Contract Labor in the Industries of Western Nepal
• Afterword. Third Wave Marketization
• Index