One hot afternoon in Kolwezi, I’m having a beer with Médard in Bar L’Aurore. The bourgemestre is there too, as well as bunch of other clients, all male. Although it is not a particularly fancy bar, there is a huge flat screen overlooking the joint. A football game is on. As Medard and me are sitting at the far end of the screen, we need to peer to try and read who is playing against whom. We do not succeed though. But this does not matter. We are talking unions, and this is where Medard’s passion lies.
Medard is generously built guy with shiny eyes and cheeks. Born and bred in Kolwezi, the town that owes its existence to the mining industry, Medard is a mineur de fond himself, a miner scraping the raw materials deep under the surface on behalf of the mining company Gécamines. But above all, he is a union representative of the UNTC, the Union National des Travailleurs du Congo, one of the majors in the country.
We talk about the pits and the shifts, the salaries and the sanctions, and Medard explains everything I want to know with fervour. When I ask him how he caught the union passion, he smiles. “Merci beaucoup pour la question,” he says, and embarks on his story.
Medard’s dad suffered hypertension problems which left him partly paralysed in 2000, the offset of a protruded pilgrimage from hospital to hospital in search of recovery. By 2005 no progress was made, and both father and son concluded that biomedicine did not have the proper answer. They decided to turn to a traditional healer instead, and chose one whom a relative had recommended. This healer lived in a village some two days by train from Kolwezi. Medard asked and was granted by the management of Gécamines a one month leave to assist his father during the cure in the village. They took off for the long ride across the bush. Once there, they spent the entire time in the village, passing by the healer each and every day, strictly following his advice. There seemed to be a slight improvement in his father’s condition.
The healing lasted a couple of days longer than planned though, and Medard feared this might cause some problems at work. To cover himself – his absence was clearly due to circumstances beyond his control after all – he had the healer, who was legally authorised to practice traditional medicine, sign a document proving that the cure had forcibly been extended. On top of that, the chief of the village added a document too, stating that Medard and his father had effectively passed their time in the village.
Fate struck father and son again on their way back though, as the railway was interrupted, and the two day train ride became a three day one. Medard now arrived at his workplace five days overdue.
He was immediately called into the office of the responsible. Not experienced in this kind of things and slightly intimidated – him being a blue-collar worker after all – Medard approached a union for assistance, who in turn sent two representatives to accompany him. The responsible received the trio in his office. Although Medard was sitting in the middle and more up front than the two representatives, it were the latter who did the talking. As the responsible explained, Medard’s sanction consisted of a mise à pied of three full days, that is a three day suspension without pay. Not too bad, one might think, but this measure has long-term consequences. Indeed, any mise à pied imposed upon an employee will stick to his dossier for the rest of his career, hindering every eventual move up the ladder of promotions.
Medard was sure though that his village-proof documents made his case watertight, and any sanction imposed upon him was mere injustice. However, it were the union representatives who did the talking, and the responsible turned out a rigid and sullen man. He refused to withdraw the mise à pied and started negotiating instead, offering to cut the sanction down from three to two days. Medard could not live with this, but the representatives seemed to think it was okay. Definitely, this meeting was not going as he’d expected. When Medard turned around to tell the two representatives he did not agree, he accidently caught them sticking up two fingers behind his back as a sign to the responsible that they would go for the two days. Medard was devastated. Were the representatives in cahoots with the management? Who was protecting whom here? He stepped out of the office, and told the union representatives he could do better than them. And he did indeed. He went up a level and asked to be received by the responsible’s superior. In his office, he himself outlined his case with fervour, swayed with signed and stamped documents, argued circumstances beyond his control and proved the unjust grounds of his mise à pied. He effectively succeeded in having the sanction classified.
This is how Medard ended up being a unionist. I can do better than that.