When retrenchment and loans coincide: the financialised precarity of Zambian mineworkers

Abstract

This article, drawing on more than 36 months of ethnographic research in two underground mine sites and two communities on the Zambian Copperbelt, examines the everyday lives of miners in a context in which banks can legally recover their loans directly from workers’ retrenchment packages. Since mines in Zambia were privatised in 2000, the global corporates that bought them have used labour retrenchment as a strategy for managing both labour costs and fluctuations in primary commodity prices. These companies have also withdrawn the various social benefits previously offered by the state-owned mining companies, leaving workers unable to meet ever-rising living costs. This has forced most workers to obtain loans from banks and other lenders. This article develops the concept of ‘financialised precarity’ to highlight how the coincidence of retrenchment and loans represents a double tragedy whereby retrenched miners see their retrenchment package go directly to the banks to pay off their loans, securing the banks’ profits. For workers, this implies prolonged periods of unemployment, uncertainty, poverty and stifled hopes.