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Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the intersection between racialized and gendered divisions in the workforce and living arrangements of a globally operating mining company in contemporary Zambia and explores different lines of contestation to the company’s hiring practices.

Paper long abstract:

The paper examines gendered and racialized labour divisions in contemporary Zambia’s mining sector. Despite the abolishment of white privilege in Zambia’s economy after the country’s independence in 1964, a similar form of racialized division of labour can be seen in the mining sector today again. In Northwestern Zambia, almost exclusively 'White' and almost exclusively male expatriate mine managers and senior supervisors, together with their wives and children, reside in an estate in the middle of a new mining town for the duration of their contract with a mining company headquartered in Canada.

Their presence is an expression of both global and regional divisions of labour structured along racial lines. The mining company which has strong regional (white Rhodesian) roots privileges ‘Whites’ over ‘Blacks’ for leading positions and prefers ‘White’ South Africans over other ‘Whites’. Further, the mine’s management strongly supports family life to ‘stabilize’ its expatriate workforce. My first focus is the intersection between racialized and gendered divisions in the mine’s workforce and the estate. While residents engage little with the world outside the electric fence, the estate – and the mine – are functionally integrated into the municipal economy and live off the reproductive labour of the urban communities.

The estate’s homogeneity does not create a harmonious community, though. As a second focus, I explore different lines of contestation to the company’s hiring practices, from single working women to contract workers, and the possibilities of global solidarities between a conceptually differentiated albeit interdependent global South and global North.