Towards a life of poverty and uncertainty? The livelihood strategies of Gécamines workers after retrenchment in the DRC

ABSTRACT

In 2003, with the support of the World Bank, the Congolese state-owned enterprise Gécamines implemented a voluntary departure programme for 10,000 employees with more than 25 years of service. These employees were asked to regard their severance pay as a capital to be invested in new activities. Based on ethnographic research, this article explores how ex-Gécamines workers made a living in the phase of their ‘reintegration’. In doing so, it develops a sociological approach to popular economic practices that attempts to move beyond the phenomenology of uncertainty recently advocated by several Africanist scholars.

RÉSUMÉ

En 2003, l’entreprise d’État congolaise Gécamines a mis en place avec le soutien de la Banque mondiale une procédure de départ volontaire pour 10 000 employés avec plus de 25 ans d’ancienneté. Ces employés étaient invités à considérer leur décompte final comme un capital à investir dans de nouvelles activités économiques. Basé sur une recherche ethnographique, cet article étudie la manière dont les ex-agents de la Gécamines se sont débrouillés dans le cours de leur « réinsertion ». Ce faisant, il développe une approche sociologique des pratiques économiques populaires qui tente d’aller au-delà de la phénoménologie de l’incertitude récemment défendue par plusieurs chercheurs africanistes.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurship
• uncertainty
• retrenchment
• informal economy
• neoliberalism
• mining
• DR Congo

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Entrepreneuriat
• incertitude
• licenciement
• économie informelle
• néolibéralisme
• secteur minier
• RD Congo

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Benjamin Rubbers is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Liège and Lecturer at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. His research deals with social changes in the Congolese copperbelt, where he has been on frequent fieldtrips since 1999. His publications – three monographs and about 20 articles – focus on various core themes, including university education, trade networks, state reform and family dynamics. His current research project looks at the micropolitics of work in the mining sector in Congo and Zambia.

Notes

1 In 2015, Katanga province was divided into four smaller provinces. For reasons of convenience, however, I will continue to refer to Katanga below.

2 During fieldwork, I conducted interviews with 50 managers and workers. I also attended meetings of the Collectif and collected a large number of documents. I was able to develop a closer relationship with five residents of Panda, and accompany them as they went about their everyday activities.

3 Although such a mode of analysis is legitimate in itself (Mitchell 1983), it could be fruitfully used as a prerequisite for a survey on a larger scale. The survey conducted with 800 partants for the World Bank in 2009, however, shows the difficulties in operating neat statistical classifications and correlations in a largely informal economy. The report presenting its results seems to ignore that ex-Gécamines employees have multiple livelihood activities. It only takes into account the activity that was declared by respondents, and discusses the relative importance of each activity on the basis of a confusing classification: subsistence agriculture, subsistence and commercial agriculture, informal sector regular, independent liberal and so on. At the end of their analysis, the authors of the report explain that it was not possible to isolate determining factors of ‘success’ or ‘vulnerability’, because of the number of factors coming into play and their often ambiguous quality (depending on circumstances, to have a large family may be a burden or an advantage, for example).

4 Union minière had developed, from the late 1920s onwards, an impressive infrastructure to ‘stabilise’ its workers and take charge of every aspect of their lives (housing estates, hospitals, schools, clubs and so on). To define this policy, one could use the term of ‘industrial paternalism’ (Reid 1985).

5 Within the framework of its ‘stabilisation’ policy, Union minière promoted the ideal of the ‘modern’ family among its workers, in which the man is the breadwinner and the woman a housewife taking care of the house and children (see Hunt 1990; Rubbers 2015). In this context, few women worked for Gécamines, generally as teachers, nurses or secretaries. Interestingly, the divorce rate is said to have been high among these Gécamines female workers because of their economic independence. Incidentally, this is the case of Josiane, who was married and divorced twice.

6 Casual workers approximately earned US$1.50 per day in 2006, usually with no benefits in kind. This wage was raised to around US$3.50 per day in 2010.