Corporate paternalism refers more precisely to the use of the patriarchal family model in the employment relationship. As such, it can be associated with a certain number of features: the rejection of external interferences from the state and trade unions; the control of workers both in and outside the workplace; a recruitment system based on personal networks; the remuneration of workers partly consists in benefits in kind that are granted as favours, not as rights. Historically, these characteristic features have been organized in various ways. The most typical forms of corporate paternalism are face-to-face paternalism; the paternalism exerted on single-sex migrant workers; and industrial paternalism.
A good illustration of industrial paternalism is provided by the labour policy that colonial mining companies in the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia put in place from the late 1930s onwards. They built mining towns, equipped with a comprehensive social infrastructure, to take in charge, and at the same time control, every aspect of workers’ life. They promoted the model of the patriarchal nuclear family among workers, and invented rites and symbols to foster a shared feeling of belonging. Implemented by professional bodies (doctors, social workers, etc.), this social policy treated employees unequally according to their race and level of skill; it was above all intended to a core of workers. Beyond the borders of mining towns, colonial companies also had a strong hold over the region in which they were established.
Industrial paternalism is generally viewed as a managerial practice of the past. In the Copperbelt, it would have given place to a form of ‘state paternalism’, which itself would have been replaced by a more flexible labour regime in the context of the recent mining boom. By contrast, the WORKINMINING project takes corporate paternalism as a starting point for studying the contemporary transformations of wage labour. Our hypothesis is that the labour policy of new mining investors does not so much break with industrial paternalism as give it new directions. There are several indications of this:
– Mining companies develop safety, health-monitoring and surveillance devices evoking the disciplinary regime imposed by colonial companies on their workers;
– Although they have a preference for cash compensation, they provide various social services to workers and intervene in their life outside the workplace – greenfield mining projects even build new mining towns equipped with various social facilities.
– Outside mining concessions, companies build new roads, schools, health centres, and, in some cases, new houses for the benefit of displaced people. In a sense, through these development programmes, new investors take on the social role held by the mining corporations of the past.
– Ultimately, they have reactivated some typical techniques of paternalism to mobilize the workforce: the celebration of corporate values and symbols, rituals of participation and loyalty, discretionary distribution of advantages in kind, and so on.
Our purpose is not to demonstrate that that paternalism is back in central Africa, but to understand how far the management practices of new mining companies reproduce or break with the paternalism of the past. The challenge for WORKINMINING is to identify the conditions determining how mining companies reinvent, or re-imagine, the tradition of industrial paternalism once distinctive of Northern Zambia and Southern Congo. This involves answering to several questions. How the conditions that allowed for the emergence of industrial paternalism have changed since the colonial period? How new investors adapt their managerial practices to the constraints they find in Congo and Zambia? How far the “moral economy” associated with industrial paternalism continues to entertain workers’ expectations towards mining companies, and to influence the labour policies within those companies? How “paternalism” is imagined, and debated over, by company representatives, workers, and political leaders?
Too often the emphasis is put on the transformative power of global mining capitalism, and the way it breaks with management practices of the 20th century. By contrast, the line of analysis developed above invites to examine historical changes into more details by paying attention to how labour policies are adapted to circumstances and negotiated with workers, trade unions, and the state. As such, it may be relevant for research on mining projects elsewhere. Generally speaking, mining projects are so capital-intensive that they amortize their investment in decades. In order to make their investment secure and profitable, they have no choice but to negotiate their presence with local “stakeholders”. The people living in and around the mines therefore hold a certain degree of power over the implementation of mining projects. In addition, foreign investors are confronted to more or less similar challenges in the global South: lack of skilled workers, a weak and corrupt state, poor local communities with strong expectations in terms jobs, infrastructures, or social programs, and activists all too ready to criticize how mining companies handle the situation. From a broader perspective, dynamics in the mining sector could be interpreted as participating to changes in regimes of responsibility at the global level. If corporate paternalism was the child of 19th-century liberalism, it could be argued that neoliberal reforms lead to give more room for manoeuvre to private companies, and at the same to put more emphasis on their social responsibilities.