Livres
Project presentation
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Understanding of the micropolitics of work in the mining sector across the African copperbelt.
In the course of the last decade, Zambia and Congo have experienced an unprecedented boom in mining investment. Companies of different sizes and origins have flocked to these countries of central Africa, seeking to extract the copper and cobalt found in houses, cars, and electronic devices worldwide. They have taken over the assets of public enterprises and developed new mining and industrial projects, both in old mining areas and greenfield sites.
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The WORKinMINING project focuses on organisation of labour amidst this recent mining boom, examining how the labour policies of the new investors are negotiated, implemented and challenged by different categories of people. The project builds on the hypothesis that the companies that have developed new mining and industrial projects in Zambia and Congo do not so much break with the tradition of industrial paternalism that marked both areas during the colonial and post-independence period, as give it new directions. Its central research question is: How companies have adapted their managerial models to the constraints they have been faced with locally, and how they together with other actors participate in the formation of new regimes of responsibility?
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The project is made up of three subprojects:
Experience of Work: Francesca Pugliese and James Musonda study the everyday life of mineworkers at work, in the family, and during leisure activities. Their aim is to analyse the social and cultural changes generated or exacerbated by the recent mining boom.
Union politics: Thomas McNamara and Kristien Geenen carry out ethnographic research with trade unions and other civil society organizations to better understand their role in changes related to labour and corporate social responsibility.
Regulation of Work: Emma Lochery and Benjamin Rubbers interview all those involved in the regulation of employment and labour: human resources managers, state representatives, and subcontractors. Their ambition is to study how labour policies are elaborated in relation to transformations in the economic and political fields.
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Through an emphasis on teamwork, project researchers will work together not just to develop a comprehensive analysis of the micropolitics of work in each country, but also to make thorough comparisons between working conditions on the Congolese and Zambian copperbelts – two historically related areas, where mining companies are confronted with more or less similar constraints.
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The WORKINMINING project seeks to deepen our understanding of the mining and extractive sector across the Global South. Generally speaking, investments in this sector take a long period of time to be amortized. In order make them secure and profitable, mining companies have no choice but to negotiate their presence with local actors – especially if they are established in poor areas, where the capacity of the state is relatively weak. Local actors hold a degree of power over the implementation of mining projects that deserves more consideration and investigation than is currently acknowledged in literature on multinationals and global capitalism.