Paper short abstract:

Through a case study of mining labour in South Kivu, this paper argues that the recent emergence of corporate outsourcing has facilitated the adverse incorporation and fragmentation of Congolese labour which has, in turn, weakened the collective strength of workers to resist their marginality.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, the global mining industry has restructured away from vertical integration and towards the outsourcing of a range of activities and services to independent firms. While some scholars have welcomed this development as advancing the prospects for mineral-led industrialisation in low-income African countries, its potential effects on labour have been given less consideration. The proposed paper seeks to redress this gap, through a historical case study of the evolution of industrial mining labour in South Kivu Province of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo from the 1920s to today. Drawing on archival records, corporate documentation, and conversations and interviews conducted during twelve months of fieldwork in 2016 and 2017, the paper argues that the recent emergence of corporate outsourcing in South Kivu's industrial mining sector has facilitated the adverse incorporation and fragmentation of Congolese labour. This has, in turn, weakened the collective strength of workers to resist and counteract their marginality by feeding into and accentuating pre-existing class, spatial and kinship-territorial divisions. The cumulative effect is the near total absence of labour militancy at the mine, despite the fact that nearly half of the mine's workers experience informal status, subsistence or near-subsistence (and stagnant) wages, and poor access to benefits.