Labour power, materiality and protests in Ghana’s petroleum and gold mines

Abstract

We examine the role of resource materiality in extractive labour protests in Ghana. Focusing on petroleum and gold mining, we centre contestations as part of the resources’ socio-natural constituents. Research data was obtained from social conflict databases, newspapers and field interviews. The analysis focused on themes and discourses on protest emergence, mobilisation, negotiation and impacts. Findings show how petroleum labour protesters use passivity and chokepoints to impede gas supply to households. Ghana petroleum workers attempt to garner structural power through workplace power, albeit unsuccessfully. Conversely, gold mineworkers protest by actively reappropriating machinery and extraction spaces. They centre protests in mining towns to emphasise their work as lifeblood. The ‘landedness’ of gold and the introduction of surface mining reshaped such protest tactics. Thus, materiality can help excavate the relational and comparative logic, tactics and potentialities of labour power in resource extracting countries. We suggest extractive labour to forge stronger cross-class coalitions to align workplace exploitation with broader issues of accumulation by dispossession.

‘We work for the Devil’: Oil extraction, kinship and the fantasy of time on the offshore frontier

“…The industry routinely invokes spurious and racist claims about the ‘lack of expertise’ of local staff and the ‘poor quality’ of locally sourced goods and materials to justify discriminatory hiring practices and contracts. 8 As the industry relies on an extensive network of subcontractors, its labour force is stratified between a ‘local’ workforce that remains concentrated in lower-tier positions, and a highly mobile and privileged ‘expatriate’ class of workers in managerial positions (Otchere-Darko and Ablo, 2022). Unequal and differential mobilities underpin the dynamics of offshore labour, including precarious and contrived employment in its supply chains, and relatively immobile, gendered, and unpaid labour of social reproduction (Cresswell et al, 2016).…”

“…8.On the experiences of Ghanaian oil workers and the discriminatory work environment of the offshore see Ablo (2018, 2022) and Otchere-Darko and Ablo (2022).…”