Paper short abstract:

The mining industry in Peru creates internal migration flows to mining centres. Meanwhile, external labour flexibility through subcontracting and temporal work gains importance. This research shows that different employee groups, formed by those two tendencies, perform unequal labour in terms of health.

Paper long abstract:

The mining industry in Peru is responsible for 49.2% of the total export and approximately 450,000 Peruvians were working in the industry in 2006. This investigation connects internal migration, external labour flexibility and the health of miners in the mining industry in 2012.

The mining industry causes labour migration flows to mining centers. Those flows create differences between rural and urban(1), indigenous and non-indigenous(2) and finally local and non-local miners(3). Moreover, some authors suppose that rural, indigenous and local miners fulfill the "bad" secondary jobs, while the others fulfill the "better" primary jobs. Besides internal migration the industry is characterized by external labour flexibility, which is connected with reductions in work related health. External flexibility could create health-differences between miners in subcontracted firms and miners in head companies(4) and finally between temporal and permanent miners(5).

The health of miners is shown in a unique model which combines labour organisation and function characteristics. Western sociology focuses on the demand-control model, supposing that only active work with high labour demands and labour control is healthy. This model has a narrow focus on the labour organization of mine organizations, so that, this research adds the concept of "overworked".

The influence of the five segregation lines on health is investigated through methodological triangulation. In addition, the research works with expert interviews and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). QCA gives deterministic paths, combinations of conditions derived from the different segregation lines, which lead to unhealthy and healthy labour in the mining industry in Peru in 2012.