Claiming workers' rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo: the case of the Collectif des ex-agents de la Gécamines

Abstract

Within the context of its strategy for the reform of public companies in Africa, the World Bank became involved in redundancies of questionable legality. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, the Bank arranged and financed a voluntary severance programme in 2003, whereby 10,000 employees of the mining company Gécamines, some 45% of its workforce, left in return for an arbitrarily fixed lump-sum payment. Based on ethnographic research, this paper discusses the history of the protest movement which emerged from this mass redundancy programme, the arguments deployed by the movement and the resources available to it. On the basis of this case study, the paper goes on to offer some thoughts on the conditions for social criticism in a transitional regime, heir to an authoritarian tradition of long standing, and operating under the tutelage of foreign donors.

Mining Boom, Labour Market Segmentation and Social Inequality in the Congolese Copperbelt

“…To allow Gécamines to continue its own operations on a smaller scale, the World Bank put in place a restructuring plan that involved reducing the company's personnel from 24,000 to 14,000 workers. This reduction in staff was organized within the framework of a controversial ‘voluntary departure programme’ in 2003 – 04 (Rubbers, 2010, 2017).…”

Mining

“…On the other hand, Elizabeth Ferry's book about a collectively owned mine in Mexico shows that workers see their mine as a form of patrimony to be passed down to their children, even as the silver they produce is sold into a global market (2005). While some workers resist authority, workers living in places with histories of patronage and hierarchy may embrace it (Rubbers 2010, Winchell 2017, and actively try to subordinate themselves to superiors in order to claim traditional rights over them. In these cases, mine owners who reject their role as boss and patron are the ones who may experience labour unrest.…”

Permanent precarity: capital and labour in the Central African copperbelt

“…The mining boom since the mid-2000s has brought new forms of 'shape-shifting' capital to the Central African Copperbelt (Gewald & Soeters, 2010). Whilst these certainly take a neo-liberal form, this is arguably reflective of the same economic considerations that influenced the shift to stabilisation in the mid-twentieth century: contemporary mining companies, able to sustain operations with a far smaller workforce than their predecessors, calculate that they can shift the cost of reproduction onto their workers and the state, but still find themselves resisting demands by copperbelt communities, expressed in various ways, to take responsibility for the social and, increasingly, the environmental effects of their operations (Fraser & Larmer, 2010;Rubbers, 2010Rubbers, , 2013.…”