The unions are the mines’ biggest partners, but they do not act like it: union ‘corruption’ and shareholder-primacy on Zambia’s copperbelt

ABSTRACT

This article explores the dichotomous co-production of ‘corrupt unions’ and ‘shareholder-driven corporations’. It argues that discourses of Zambian union corruption convolved national political history, shifting moral economies and global responses to organised labour’s disempowerment; obfuscating the structural causes of low wages and under-development. Semiotically created in comparison to corrupt unions were shareholder-driven, economically rational corporations. In problematising the naturalisation of these actors’ economic choices, the article reconceptualises their actions through exploring negotiations over their responsibilities between workers, employers and the state. It argues that in these negotiations narratives of shareholder primacy and Corporate Social Responsibility emboldened claims for high profits, low wages and minimal tax takes; while a self-reinforcing perception of corruption lowered workers’ expectations of what could be achieved through collective action.

RÉSUMÉ

Dans cet article, nous explorons comment les notions de ‘syndicats corrompus’ et de ‘corporations dirigées par leurs actionnaires’ se créent mutuellement. Nous avançons que les discours sur la corruption des syndicats zambiens entremêlent l’histoire nationale politique zambienne, le dévoiement de la moralité des économies, et les réponses globales à l’affaiblissement des syndicats; et que ce processus a mené à une dissimulation des causes structurelles des bas salaires et du sous-développement. Au travers de ces discussions s’est développée une comparaison entre l’image de syndicats corrompus et celle de corporations rationnelles sur le plan économique et dirigées par leurs actionnaires. Dans cet article, nous problématisons la naturalisation des choix économiques de ces acteurs, et nous privilégions une exploration des négociations entre les travailleurs, les employeurs et l’état au sujet de leurs responsabilités. Nous concluons qu’au cours de ces négociations, le postulat de la primauté des actionnaires et celui de la responsabilité sociale des entreprises ont renforcé les arguments en faveur de bénéfices élevés, de salaires bas et d’une imposition minimale; tandis que la perception des Zambiens selon laquelle tout résultat sur le plan social découle de la corruption a mené à une baisse des attentes des travailleurs quant à ce qu’ils pourraient obtenir par le biais d’une mobilisation sociale.

KEYWORDS:

• Unionism
• Zambia
• neoliberalism
• corruption
• transnational capitalism

Introduction

My first experience of Zambian union ‘corruption’ occurred in March 2017, when National Executives from the Mineworkers Union of Zambia (MUZ) and the National Union of Mine and Allied Workers (NUMAW) invited me to watch wage negotiations with First Quantum Minerals (FQM). We arrived and were greeted by First Quantum’s HR officers and the unions’ Branch Executives- volunteer unionists employed by FQM. The HR Officers and National Executives went to a secluded location, and I waited with the Branch Executives. I asked where they had gone and the NUMAW Branch Chairman explained that:

At the beginning of the meetings, they [National Leaders and Company HR] go off together to take bribes.

Twenty minutes later, MUZ’s Branch Chairman quipped that the ‘consultations’ were taking longer than usual. His joke sparked an angry discussion about union corruption. NUMAW’s Branch Treasurer threatened to leave in disgust and had to be calmed by his compatriots.

However, these unionists’ stories of corruption were laced with humour, resignation and even admiration. The HR Officers and union National Executives returned for lunch. By chance they sat in hierarchical order, with the senior union leaders on one table, the Branch Chairmen in the middle and the junior Branch Executives beside them. The Branch Executives laughed that this hierarchy mapped directly onto their body size – wiry junior unionists worked underground, and had a diet of almost pure carbohydrates, while senior union leaders – former miners themselves, had frequently bulked up through meat and office work. This sparked a hearty discussion about one’s right to ‘eat’ when one achieved a high status, and the moral imperatives of being someone with ‘muscle’.

The negotiation session lasted for five hours. Every 20 minutes, discussions were paused and unionists caucused in small groups. National Executives would urge branch leaders to consider potential trade-offs, while management held-firm on their low wage offer. Some suggestions would benefit the entire workforce, increased break-time for example; others would assist a sub-section of miners, additional assistance with funerals or leniency in disciplinary disputes; and a minority would primarily benefit the individual, like ensuring that their children were admitted to the mine’s prestigious, subsidised school. One HR manager sat next to me as he calculated the costs of the changes the unionists proposed. He gestured at the caucusing miners, rolled his eyes and said ‘you see what we are up against’.

The negotiations ended with public accusations of union corruption. MUZ Branch Executives claimed that NUMAW’s President had offered them cash to accept a lower offer, which they had refused; NUMAW’s Branch Executives made identical claims about MUZ’s leaders. An HR Officer later told me that that FQM wanted to give their 13,000 workers a generous pay-rise, but had been worried that if they admitted that the mine was financially healthy, the (twelve) unionists would have demanded a large bribe.

Despite living with a Branch Chairman for a year, interviewing over one-hundred miners and constantly observing interactions between unionists and mine companies’ HR, I never met anyone who admitted to taking a bribe. I did, however, frequently witness people slightly enriching themselves through their union position; for example, receiving several days’ salary as a meeting attendance fee. I also saw other, more significant windfalls; influential union leaders were often contracted to provide construction services at the mines where they represented workers. Further, despite assertions of transparency, unionists of all statuses held private meetings with company HR. Supposed bribes, individuated advancement and secret meetings were convolved in Zambian miners’ discussions of corruption. This discourse obfuscated the weakness of the unions vis-à-vis the mining companies. Zambian labour law left unions without power to compel employers to raise wages (McNamara 2021a); and at private meetings unionists primarily negotiated minor concessions in exchange facilitating management’s legally-enforceable directives (see Musonda 2021). Where my interviews with company HR, government officials and even unionists, described a powerful, but corrupt labour movement, interfering with the efficient management of shareholder-driven companies; my participant observation implied disempowered unionists making moral claims within unequal interactions with mine executives.

This article does not explore the veracity of reports of unionists’ corruption. Rather it focuses on the dichotomous co-production of ‘corrupt unions’ and ‘shareholder-driven corporations’. I make two claims about Zambians’ narratives of corruption: I show that discourses of union corruption conflated national political history, shifting Copperbelt moral economies and global responses to organised labour’s disempowerment; and I argue that this semiotic object obfuscated the structural causes of low wages and under-development. I then explore the shareholder-driven, economically rational corporations, which were coproduced with corrupt unions. I highlight the symbiosis between narratives of Global South corruption and of shareholder-primacy in the resource allocations company representatives fought for; and I foreground the similarities between practices labelled union corruption and those described as company Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

This article builds upon literature that conceptualises discourses and semiotic objects as producing, rather than describing economies (Appel 2019; Bear 2015). This literature helps to explain the discursive creation of resource frontiers in settled communities and the adverse incorporation of local workers into extractive projects (Hickey and du Toit 2007; Verbrugge and Geenen 2019). Allegations of union corruption have been used to explain, at least partially, Zambian miners’ impoverishment (Burawoy 1972; Fraser 2010; Lee 2017); and combating corruption is a burgeoning field of development practice (Harrison 2007; Kasser-Tee 2020). In contrast, combing insights from authors including Appel (2019) and Welker (2014), I argue that the ‘corrupt union’ and the ‘shareholder-driven corporation’ were mutually co-constructive narratives, with real world economic and policy impacts. I build upon Muir and Gupta’s (2018) recent insights into ‘total corruption’ in the Global South by exploring how this perceived corruption valorises the actions of TNCs; and I complement Keskula and Sanchez’s (2019) understanding of disillusionment with unions, by showing how a self-reinforcing perception of corruption lowered workers’ expectations of what could be achieved through collective action.

Co-production of ‘corruption’ and ‘economic rationality’

This article follows anthropologists including Appel (2019), Tsing (2015) and Bear (2015) in exploring how capitalism’s discourses and labels are productive, rather than merely misleading. It focuses on the interplay between two diametrically opposed semiotic objects; the shareholder-driven international corporation and the corrupt Global South union. The latter is understood to hamper development, a narrative that contours Zambia’s resource distribution and its labour legislation. In the context of contests over and within Zambia’s moral economy, ‘union corruption’ and shareholder primacy supported the ethical frameworks and resource allocative policies through which mineral wealth left Zambia.¹

One of the key semiotic constructs of the neoliberal era is the shareholder-driven, international corporation. This entity responds solely to rational economic incentives; unfettered by history, geography and the ideologies of its constituent actors (Ho 2009; Welker 2014). It both creates and responds to the free market by constantly maximising shareholder value. The presence of a company’s untethered investors affirms its current market rationality and serves as a warning to those who may regulate it (governments) or make claims upon it (unions) (Appel 2019). Assertions of shareholder privilege create a coherence between the behaviours of ‘market-driven’ individuals and organisations (Mitchell 2002). This coherence is assumed even when behaviours appear to serve ends other than pure economic rationality (C.S.R.) or make little economic sense (wealthy expatriate middle-management) (Mitchell 2005). Shareholder privilege is emboldened by a moral project where perfect capital mobility ensures investment efficiency and combats global poverty (Bear 2015). Corporate actors’ behaviour is further justified through chains of equivalence that link global-western-and-standard. Through these chains, acts like extensive outsourcing and tax-avoidance become technocratic, replicable and morally neutral. They are then covertly associated with social liberalism and democracy through a dichotomy with Global South corruption and incompetence (Butler 2015). This is affirmed every time employees of international corporations and NGOs juxtapose their own commitment to liberalism (social and economic) against the duplicity they supposedly encounter in their host nations (Harrison 2007; Welker 2014).

The shareholder-driven corporation (and actors associated with it) are, therefore, rendered inevitable by shareholder primacy; righteous through liberalism and neutral through the equivalence of global-western-and-standard. It carries a collection of models for tax and labour laws and for resource sharing mechanisms through which corporations accumulate ever more wealth (c.f. Behrends, Park, and Rottenburg 2014; Moyo, Jha, and Yeros 2018). These discourses and models then interact with national and intra-national moral economies: historically, socially and culturally determined norms, meanings and practices used to evaluate resource distributing interactions, obligations and relationships; and through this to mediate and justify inequalities of accumulation (see Palomera and Vetta 2016). While nations and communities have varied expectations of corporations, it was only recently that corporations were discursively reduced to the private property of the purely profit-maximising shareholders (Ho 2009). Corporate actors, therefore, commonly advocate viciously for investors, while working within moral and legal systems structured for consensus-based negotiations over relationships between workers, investors and the state (Rubbers 2021).

As well as challenging resource claims from the state and employees, shareholder-driven corporations label a subset of redistributions CSR. In the extractive sector these redistributions are typically small, geographically-coded and market-based. These include preferencing locals in selling to a mine and offering community health and education services (Appel 2019). They can be complemented by transparency initiatives, which claim to reduce corruption, funding development without the need to raise taxes or wages (which would result in shareholders investing less in the nation) (Barry 2013). Among the most significant of these is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. A national board of representatives from extractive companies, government and civil society come together to examine and publish mining company tax payments (Papyrakis, Rieger, and Gilberthorpe 2016). This nominally allows civil society to ensure that tax is paid, but in Zambia is more effective for questioning how the government uses tax payments.

CSR can be framed as entirely market-driven; the cost of attracting quality staff, enhancing company reputation and obtaining a social license to operate from communities surrounding a mine (Rajak 2011). Often, however, there is a slippage between the corporation as an economic actor and the company and its staff as moral beings (Welker 2014). I will show that CSR work, while discursively opposed to union service provisioning, operates within similar moral and practical frameworks to unionists’ and governments’ discretionary funding. Within these frameworks, CSR renders some claims legitimate through depicting them as market necessitated, and in doing so justifies the wealth of shareholders and company management, and reinforces narratives of Zambian corruption.

The semiotics and substance of corruption

Invoked by company representatives, development practitioners and unionised workers world-wide, ‘corruption’ is a nebulous analytic category. However, it is a folk category with significant purchase for explaining Global South poverty and unions’ weakness (Muir 2016); and it is a vibrant development policy space (Kasser-Tee 2020; Papyrakis, Rieger, and Gilberthorpe 2016). In this manner is it a ‘North Atlantic universal’, a concept like development or democracy that ‘projects transhistorical relevance’ allowing its invoker to move seamlessly between the descriptive and normative, and encouraging solutions and programs that travel from the North to the South and justify unjust accumulations (Muir and Gupta 2018: S6; see also Moyo, Jha, and Yeros 2018). I argue that this duality of discourse and apparatus reinforces the legitimacy of foreign capital and reduces workers’ engagement with unions.

Development organisations blame corruption for nations’ failure to transition into wealthy democracies; and use corruption as a term to discount democratic decisions made in poor nations (Tidey 2018). Anti-corruption projects invite recipients to define corruption through their experiences of it (Kasser-Tee 2020). National-level projects often present ‘Transparency’ as the antidote to corruption. This is operationalised by reducing public representatives’ discretion in resource allocation and by employing Global North accountancy firms (Osburg 2018; Shore 2018). These projects frame forms of bureaucratic autonomy valorised in the Global North (and among company representatives) as corruption and they entrench discourses of corruption’s ubiquity among citizens and publics in the Global South.

Public discussions of corruption evaluate behaviours and resource allocations. The term typically describes the transgression of social norms, rather than necessarily illegal acts (Muir 2016). In some cases, ‘corruption’ can express admiration at specific responses to structural inequality (Tidey 2018). However, in nations like Zambia, citizens experience what Muir (2016) describes as ‘total corruption’, where corruption is understood as the principal force eroding … the normative order. They engage with this through a ‘negative belonging’, experiences of daily interactions with, and through this complicity in, corruption that dampens expectations of collective action. Hornberger (2018) argues that this negative belonging reduces aspiration for public service and affirms the righteousness of neoliberal entrepreneurial success. Unions are particularly frequent targets of corruption accusations. These accusations resonate more easily with public institutions like organised labour (Shore 2018); and unions rely on narratives of conflict that leave their members disappointed with daily practices of mitigation (Keskula and Sanchez 2019). These factors are entwined on Zambia’s Copperbelt, further weakening workers’ representation as they solidified the discursive distinction between ‘corrupt Zambian unions’ and ‘shareholder-driven, rational mining companies’.

Union corruption, market efficiency and north-south contests over Zambia’s mining wealth

In Zambia’s mining sector, near daily allegations of corruption are made by workers, unionists and company representatives. A near shibboleth is that union and government corruption has been key to Zambia’s under-development; and that without this corruption, copper-mining would have funded national prosperity (Larmer 2005). Zambians perceive corruption to be caused by a failure of their national character. A union shop steward explained to me that:

The trouble with Zambians is that we love money too much, we will take money to be silent and will sell out our own blacks.

Zambians of all walks of life claimed that corruption through ‘selfishness’ and ‘personal interests’ was the key cause of underdevelopment. They found this corruption among chiefs, the government, unionists, HR managers and would identify and bemoan their own ‘habits’, like paying bribes to facilitate daily services (see Muir 2016).

This perceived corruption is crucial to justifying the resource allocations posited by mine company representatives and to disregarding the claims of workers and their representatives. In detailing its construction within Zambia’s political economy and union practice, I describe an economic history where a negative belonging has been mapped onto a North–South divide; and a moral economy where corruption describes violations of intra-personal resource-sharing obligations (see Haynes 2017). I link this to global practices of overstating union strength, which inadvertently encourage attributing worsening workplace conditions to individuated corruption (Keskula and Sanchez 2019). The remainder of the article explores how this ‘corruption’ justifies the resource allocations made through invoking the ‘shareholder-driven corporation’.

Economic history, total corruption and neoliberal reform

Zambia’s political history has been defined by contests between workers, the state and (primarily foreign) investors over its mines. From the early 1900s, copper mines in what is now Zambia were run by the British South Africa Company (BSAC) (Money 2022). Upon independence, these mines provided approximately half of Zambia’s GDP, and in the late 1960s, 75,546 people were employed in the mining sector (Lungu 2008). Zambia’s mines now generate 85 per cent of export earnings and 74,000 jobs, but only 28,000 of these are ongoing positions. Linked to debates over the relationship between taxation, wages and profits are ongoing questions about how much control Zambians should have over the mines; and how much should rest with investors, International Financial Institutions and expatriate mine specialists. Over time, ‘Zambians’ corruption’ has become a key discourse for delegitimising national actors and for explaining their failures to profit under current taxation and labour laws.

In the colonial-era ‘tribalism’, as a discursive precursor to ‘corruption’, justified foreign control of the mines. When Zambian workers demanded unionisation, mining’s executives argued that their tribal nature made this unwise, instead creating Tribal Councils (Epstien 1958). The colonial government used similar narratives to refute claims to national independence (Cooper 1996). Modern Zambian politicians and union leaders now deploy tribalism and corruption almost interchangeably, accusing their political opponents of both in their division of state resources (Kapesea and McNamara 2020).

After independence in 1964, Zambia’s mines were slowly nationalised into the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM). Seeing the Mineworkers Union of Zambia as a potential competitor, the government neutered the union by essentially outlawing miners’ strikes; and co-opted it, through mandating miners’ unionisation (Larmer 2007). Miners’ wages and Zambia’s economy entered a long decline. GDP growth reversed from 6.7 per cent to negative 2.4 per cent during the 1970s and by the end of the decade, 80 per cent of the country’s population was experiencing extreme poverty (Lungu 2008). Miners believed that union corruption diminished their wages and Zambians perceived their national government to be diverting the mines’ wealth into political patronage (Burawoy 1972; Larmer 2005).

Over the late 1990s and early 2000s, national assets representing 85 per cent of Zambia’s economy were sold. ZCCM was privatised into seven mine packages – with the government keeping 20 per cent of each package (Fraser 2010). Reforms aimed at attracting investors occurred in unison: outlawing sympathy strikes, legalising extensive subcontracting and weakening workers’ protections (Lee 2017; Musonda 2021). These changes were disastrous for Zambia and for its miners. In 1994 there were 60,000 permanent pensionable Zambian miners, but by 2000, the total mine workforce was approximately 22,000 (Uzar 2017). In 2005, mines paid $75 m in total contributions to the Zambian treasury, less than a third of what they were paying in 1991 (Adam and Simpasa 2010).

‘Zambian corruption’ plays a key part in miners’ understandings of ZCCM’s privatisation and of their post-privatisation material circumstances. The president who oversaw the mines’ sale was arrested for corruption (Mbao 2011). Zambia’s current president was a government valuator and is rumoured to have made his fortune facilitating the under-pricing of mine assets. In writing-down ZCCM’s debt, MUZ’s President and General Secretary agreed to have miners’ pensions retrospectively drastically reduced (Larmer 2007).² In the context of privatisation’s poor outcomes, unions and government frequently attempt to retake control and wealth from the mining companies. However, when this occurs, through everything from tax changes to strikes, mine managers and social commentators admonish Zambian institutions for their corruption, and threaten that such action will discourage investors (Lee 2017). The privatisation process, therefore, entrenched Zambian perceptions of the ‘total corruption’ of their state and presented unfettered international capital as a flawed but necessary response to this (see Muir 2016).

Kinship, obligation and muscle

As well as critiquing national institutions, Zambians invoke ‘corruption’ when describing changing (and increasingly unmeetable) intra-family and community obligations. The moral personhoods of wakopala – Copperbelt resident – and particularly shimaini – miner – are enacted through redistributing resources to kin (Kapesea and McNamara 2020; McNamara 2021a). In this moral economy ‘moving’, through increasing one’s wealth, entwines personal and spiritual righteousness (Haynes 2017). ‘Amalevels’, the hierarchical social level on which a person ‘belongs’, determines the morally appropriate types of consumption, and with this one’s responsibilities to kin and community (McNamara 2021b). The moral economy that contained ‘moving’ and ‘levels’ was contested and shifting in response to material hardship. Urban Zambians feel less obligated to share with rural kin (Musonda 2021); and people increasingly can only achieve their levels through entrepreneurship or through semi-legal activities that cause someone to ‘get embarrassed but to get full’ (Mususa 2014). Both what it meant to be wealthy, and the obligations this entailed, were debated, with ‘the market’ and ‘corruption’ invoked to justify and evaluate patterns of redistribution and accumulation.

Zambian unionists’ comparative wealth made them common targets for corruption accusations. Branch Executives rarely earned significantly more than their peers, but could be accused of corruption if they did not redistribute the rewards of union work – like meeting attendance fees. National union leaders were necessarily rich, with ‘muscle’ needed to win union elections (see below) and unions themselves, even when bankrupt, used resources like 4WDs that were unavailable to most Zambians. Zambian miners discussed corruption almost daily, using the term to describe the actions of competitor unions, their own union leaders and occasionally themselves. Their discussions linked selfishness to compromising relationships, and to the perceived moral failings of all Zambians. For a Branch Chairman named Otis, corruption manifested when:

Instead of having a heart for the workers, he [Otis’ predecessor] had focused on his personal interests.

Another Branch Chairman explained that:

Corruption is not just ‘I give you a bag of money and you vote for me’, corruption is ‘I give your son a good job in the mine’, it is ‘you have many businesses with my mine and I will favour them if you sign this’.

Resource redistribution and intra-personal care guided the legitimacy of wealth. The Deputy General Security (DGS) of one of the largest unions was frequently accused of corruption. He had a nephew ‘placed’ in a major mining company and would allegedly ‘eat’ small amounts of union funds. Equally importantly, the DGS was not generous with his own or with the union’s money. He frequently rejected Branch Executives’ requests for travel allowances when they came to Head Office for trivial reasons, and he claimed to have no personal money when asked to assist with emergencies. He was ‘corrupt’ because, through his ‘eating’ and his unionist acumen, he had grown wealthy, but he did not assist others.

In contrast, that union’s General Secretary (GS) ran a labour-hire company, which held contracts at major mines, yet union members rarely accused him of corruption. Miners admired that he used his union position to obtain wealth to support a large extended family and he was exceptionally generous with the union funds and his own. Branch executives would often wait outside his office for hours to receive a travel or meal allowance, rather than ask for one from the DGS. The GS was also famously (performativity) militant in wage negotiations. When asked about his sub-contracting companies, one Branch Executive explained that:

He is very good friends with management, but when he engages with in negotiations he is very firm … he will say ‘I will tell the people to strike because of you’.

The GS’s personalisation of union resources was the opposite of the DGS’ parsimonious corruption, and when combined with militancy, evidenced his ‘muscle’.

While redistributing wealth demonstrated a ‘heart for the workers’; it was simultaneously vital to accumulate resources, which provided the ‘muscle’ to represent miners. Like ‘moving’ and ‘levels’, ‘muscle’ entwined wealth and righteousness, enabling one to withstand temptation and evidencing success. Yet, obtaining muscle typically necessitated parlaying union influence to employers or to private service providers. Demonstrating ‘muscle’ was crucial to union elections for National Executive roles. A Branch Chairman claimed that he would spend at least 320,000ZMW on his election campaign – money earned through having his employer stage events in the bar he owned. He stated:

Maybe someone else will be giving incitements [to vote for them], maybe 1000ZMW, so I will have to give too. I will need to show that I have the financial muscle, so that they will know that I will go to Head Office and not just eat.

This understanding, that muscle diminished temptation, provided a counter narrative to accusations that the unions were wealthy because of corruption. Senior unionists argued that it was impossible for management to bribe them, as they were richer than HR Officers. In this narrative, MUZ’s wealth symbolised its muscle and its honesty. A MUZ Branch Chairman in Zambia’s North West, driving an expensive, union provided Jeep, explained:

If I am driving this car, which is better than the presidents of the other unions, and you can see the 4WD that [MUZ General Secretary] Joseph Chewe is driving, that means the union is strong, that none of our money is wasted and that none of it is corrupt.

If MUZ had the best cars, it must be the strongest union, and as it was the wealthiest, it had the least need to accept bribes. This narrative – built through practices that reflected Zambian moral norms – was undercut by laws which prevented unions from producing substantial outcomes for members.

Unions as institutions of collective strength and individual weakness

Aspects of standard union practice encouraged responding to failure with accusations of corruption. Several authors have explored how unionists are motivated by narratives of organised labour’s power (Lazar 2017); and noted that accusations of union corruption are common worldwide (Keskula and Sanchez 2019). Blaming individual unionists’ corruption for low wages and frequent firings allowed narratives of strength to remain credible in the context of seemingly ever worsening workplace conditions. Almost every wage negotiation concluded with allegations of corruption. Each union’s branch executives explained that they personally had been tough with management, but representatives from the other unions had been bribed by HR. They would promise to achieve better results in the next negotiation, if miners left their competitor unions, as it was these unions’ corruption (rather than Zambia’s labour laws) that prevented a pay-rise. Media outlets repeated these accusations. A newspaper article titled ‘Union Leaders Face Corruption Allegations’ claimed that ‘The top union leaders have allegedly been secretly meeting with MCM [Mopani Copper Mines] management in a bid to compromise the ongoing 2018 salary talks … [union leaders] have been promised colossal sums of money’.

Similarly, every union branch election campaign attributed problems at the workplace to the incumbent’s corruption. Often this alleged corruption was evidenced by minor grievances and small personal advancements, within an encompassing environment of low wages and disappointment. Otis’ core evidence for describing his predecessor as corrupt was that, when the company paid him to buy Christmas chickens, he had bought small chickens and supposedly kept money for himself. At another mine, union National Executives had brought an old 4WD from the mining company for the branch’s use and HR occasionally paid for this car’s petrol. Miners saw the union branch as hopelessly compromised by the National Executives and by company management. Challengers campaigned by promising: ‘As soon as we become Branch Executives we will take that car’. After the election, the new Chairman drove the old Branch Chairman home. They shared jokes and the new Chairman offered a shop steward role to his ‘corrupt’ predecessor.

Effective daily representation, built through unequal negotiations and a constant search for funds, ran counter to narratives of union puissance. This further opened Branch Executives to accusations of corruption. While one of the first lessons taught to Branch Executives was ‘never be along with management’, secret meetings with HR staff (shaped by the unions’ comparative weakness) were crucial to having a miner forgiven for a fireable disciplinary infraction, offered time-off for funerals, or allowed to access an advance against their salary. Further, if relations with management broke down, union branches needed funds to seek legal advice and to offer financial assistance to members. Branch Executives were miners’ first point of call for informal financial assistance and most Chairmen found themselves donating their own wages to their co-workers, who need money for a funeral, school fees, or even rent.

Branch Executives, therefore, attempted to parley their access to members to create financial ‘muscle’. An insurance company offered to tailor a life insurance plan for 60ZMW a month for 3000 members at a major mining company. Smaller insurers offered plans for 15ZMW, but these businesses frequently collapsed. At a private meeting, the Branch Chairman explained:

My friends, I should add, and this is not for the stewards [junior volunteers] to be told, but Madison has offered [us] a 2% administration fee … I asked the other insurers if they offered the same and they did not, so they are not serious.

He smiled awkwardly and continued:

People will say this is a bribe, but when there is something wrong people will come to the union, so it is just payment for our time.

The executives looked at each other uncomfortably, then the Branch Treasurer slapped his biceps and said:

We need to know that they have the muscle to help our members … how do you know if someone is serious: you look at the places they live, look at the cars they drive.

A commission of 6000ZMW was most of what the branch earned every month and more than many miners’ salaries. This would substantively increase their ‘muscle’, but would be obtained in a manner that ‘people will say’ is a bribe. This muscle could be used to hire a lawyer to represent miners, pay-off the debts of a retrenched worker, or be split among the Branch Executives, reducing the temptation to accept money from HR.

In wage negotiations, branch elections and daily practice, corruption explained failings, caused by structural inequalities and tied to discomfort at the growing difference in wealth between union members and leaders. Accusations of corruption came with a promise to members that things would quickly improve, yet they reinforced perceptions of corrupt Zambians operating in a righteous (or at least neutral) global economy. The conflation described by ‘unionist corruption’ was self-reinforcing; and focusing upon it discouraged responding to structural and legal factors that constrained wages and compelled unionists into unequal cooperation with management. The remainder of this article explores the other half of this semiotic dichotomy; the shareholder-driven corporation, whose rejection of workers’ wage claims and emphasis on company driven CSR, were justified by union and government corruption.

Rational corporations in a political (and moral) economy

Semiotically co-constructed with Zambia’s corrupt mining unions were shareholder-driven, economically rational corporations. This semiotic actor was forced by ‘the market’ to maximise profit, and to offer CSR in place of higher wages or tax payments (Appel 2019; Welker 2014). In this section, I problematise the naturalisation of the economic choices of corporate actors, I reconceptualise their actions through exploring negotiations over their responsibilities. Through these negotiations, multiple resource claims and allocations were posited, with corporate efficacy and Zambian corruption emboldening high profits, low wages and minimal tax takes. I then highlight the similarity between the moral discourse and practices explained through union corruption and corporate CSR (see Rajak 2011); and I show that by supplanting organised labour and government as service providers, CSR existed in symbiosis with the narratives of corruption that emboldened shareholder-primacy’s moral valence (see Lyall 2018).

‘Corruption’s’ role in the legitimising resource allocations favoured by company representatives was overt during wage negotiations. Lacking labour laws that pressured management, Zambians’ understandings of how salaries were determined reflected economic and moral imperatives developed over long-periods of corporate paternalism and impacted by mine closures in the neoliberal era (see Rubbers 2021). Companies were compelled to share profits with their workers and to meet miners’ material ‘needs’; in response workers should sacrifice their ‘wants’ to support their employer. Miners, government officials and even many unionists, believed that corrupt union leaders caused low wages. Kitwe’s Labour Officer explained to me that union leaders:

Would prefer to be driving fancy cars than helping their workers.

I asked her how wage negotiations should occur and said explained that:

The unions are the mines’ biggest partners, but they do not act like it. They are confrontational with the mines, so the mines are confrontational with them.

She continued that the unions should prove that workers had improved productivity. Under the moral norms of their partnership, management would then be compelled to increase wages.

I explained that during wage negotiations management lied about productivity and understated the wealth of the company. The Labour Officer agreed, then added:

But why should the company give all their information to the union? They are a business and they have shareholders. These shareholders need money, so the company must protect them from the union.

When I expressed that this made it almost impossible to negotiate using increased productivity, she focused on companies’ other moral responsibilities’ to workers. She explained that ‘unions need to negotiate on needs, not wants’. This often meant linking a pay-rise to rising living costs or foregoing a salary-increase in exchange for allowances for life’s essentials; classically funeral grants. However, she stated that hand-in-hand with these, ‘needs-based’ claims, the union ‘should be doing more to improve workers’ minds’, training miners on financial management and income diversification so they could live-off diminishing salaries.

In this government-endorsed discourse workers and management were a partnership, with moral obligations to each other. Mining companies were compelled by workers’ ‘needs not wants’, and expected to share the rewards of miners’ labour. However, company management also had obligations to its shareholders, who ‘needed money’. Invoking ‘union corruption’ resolved this tension. By not ‘improving workers’ minds’ the unions were increasing the costs of meeting workers’ needs and through being ‘confrontational’ they were violating the partnership though which money should be shared.

This understanding of shareholder-driven companies struggling with inept Zambian institutions similarly delegitimised the state’s resource claims. In 2014, when the Zambian government attempted to implement a super-profits tax, the mines slowed production (Lee 2017). This, combined with declining copper prices, ravaged the economy. The Zambian mining laws were then re-written, drastically reducing mining royalties. Unionists consistently claimed that the Zambia Chamber of Mines wrote the nation’s porous mining tax, and had used threats and bribes to have it implemented. A senior Chamber of Mines employee confirmed:

The current taxation policy was written by the Chamber of Mines … we drafted it there on my desk and we lobbied for it. The reason for it was the whole country was going through tough economic conditions … so we had to sit down and explore what could work.

Invoking shareholder-primacy, he continued:

In the longer perspective of things, your taxation regime has to be centred around investment and making yourself attractive as a country … the ideally royalty rate would be 3% … but mining means so much to this country, that we [mining companies] had to sit down and see what we could do.

Fraser (2010) observed a cycle where lower copper prices lead to companies demanding tax liberalisation in Zambia. When these taxes are re-negotiated in times of high copper value, it is seen as evidence of government corruption and incompetence. Like the unions, the government had mismanaged the economy, violating the accord with the companies that produced development. It was up to mining companies’ economists to fix the situation, yet rather than pure shareholder-primacy, they responsibly balanced shareholders against the needs of a nation to whom mining means ‘so much’.

CSR as legitimate (small) claims

CSR indicted and evidenced corruption, yet it operated through similar moral logics and practices as union resource sharing. While CSR’s resource distributions were couched in market discourses, they manifested through personal relationships and the discretionary use of company funds to supplement or supplant government and union service provisioning. For the Chamber of Mine’s Chief Economist, CSR was a market imperative, which offered companies a social licence to operate, disconnected from the government. He explained:

Money needs to trickle down some way, so it is difficult to ring-fence what comes from mining, what comes from agriculture … then [the local community say] yes, this is Zambia’s copper, but we have to benefit in every way possible.

In North West Zambia, where newer mines operated in some of the poorest parts of the country; FQM ran a village banking scheme for vulnerable women. The facilitator, who described his job as ‘ensuring that the extractive sector is effectively run’, explained that this was necessary because of male control over households and government control over banks. On the Copperbelt, mining companies had worked with unions and local governments to provision services since the colonial period (see Straube 2020). CSR typically occurred through churches, scout groups and sporting clubs lobbying individual company executives for discrete assistance.

CSR was tax deductible at a national level, and was also leveraged in personal negotiations between company representatives, local governments and unionists. During a workshop on financial management, Copperbelt officials bemoaned these negotiations, contoured by the market-derived ‘budgets’ of the mines:

CSS [a mining company] said that their budget is strict, they had only budgeted 5.2million for tax, so they could only pay 5.2 million, but if the council wanted more they could pay out of their C.S.R. budget.

Evidencing the pervasive entwinement of folk ‘market rationality’ and perceived government inadequacy, the workshop’s facilitator, who worked for a tax justice NGO, explained that the company was helping the local council ‘move away from dependence on the mines’.

CSR was similarly used to respond to unions’ resource claims. In almost every wage negotiation, companies would describe their CSR programs and state that these would have to be removed if the unions insisted on using ‘that money’ for a pay-rise. Miners, especially in rural areas, complained that the company, but not the unions, make a conspicuous material contribution. Members in North West Zambia argued that:

The union has been in the North West for a long time, but we have seen nothing … miners should feel like the union is contributing to the places where we are living, but now when we have problems we are just seeing money going to Katalungu house [Union Head Office].

The Chairman of this area eventually organised ‘MUZ CSR’, where the union would distribute bins and pay for sporting trophies. At a quotidian level, CSR practice looked similar to union corruption; resource allocations were determined through personal relationships, in the context of unequitable negotiations and a porous legal system. Yet these actions were presumed to be coherent and market-driven because of the semiotics of shareholder primacy. This was self-reinforcing, with corporate Public Relations managers’ discretionary budgets (derived at least in part from low wages and negotiated taxation), enabling them, but not the unions or government to fulfil local moral claims.

‘Transparency’ served to dichotomise CSR’s gifting of resources with Zambian corruption. Increased wages and taxes would not be necessary if transparency prevented corruption, the core cause of underdevelopment (see Barry 2013). At EITI meetings, representatives from the mining sector, government and civil servants sat together. This meeting nominally determined what tax information should be made public, but primarily served to enable the personal relationships through which CSOs and MUZ could (lightly) pressure the Chamber of Mines; while reinforcing perceptions that Zambian failure was the cause of under development. Other than MUZ’s Deputy Research Director, all the civil society representatives worked for small NGOs, which were funded through their association with the EITI. CSO representatives saw their job as correcting the misguided belief that the companies did not pay enough tax. One employee explained:

The main thing the EITI has shown us is that the companies actually do pay their taxes, but that it is the government that is not spending the money well.

In contrast, MUZ’s Deputy Research Manager used the EITI meetings to lobby government representatives and the Head of the Chamber of Mines. He fought to have workers’ tax contribution included in the EITI. This increased the total tax-payments mining companies could report, but also necessitated that they provide audited records of their employment numbers.

The EITI enabled the MUZ researcher to discretely discuss problems with the Head of the Chamber of Mines. He achieved minor improvements, often focusing on safety measures or promoting Zambians rather than expatriates in specific mines. Eventually, the Chamber of Mines’ Director offered the MUZ researcher a job, which paid four times his MUZ salary. Evidencing the mutually reinforcing nature of narratives of Zambian corruption and company neutrality, the researcher, but not the Head of the Chamber of Mines, was slandered. Miners described him as:

The kind of person who is just interested in doing the best for himself and does not make things better for others.

Several poor wage negotiation outcomes were then reinterpreted as being caused by his corruption.

Rather than morally neutral corporations, responding to shareholder imperatives, mining companies and their representatives negotiated resource claims through Zambia’s shifting and contested moral economy. Deploying concepts of shareholder primacy and market rationalism, specific resource claims became legitimate (Appel 2019); and these legitimate claims were filtered through personal relationships, negotiations and judgements (Bear 2015). These then challenged or reinforced legal and moral patterns of accumulation. Union corruption and the inadequacies of the government delegitimised claims from miners’ and the state. If the union was not corrupt, then the company would not be confrontational about sharing the rewards of its workers’ labour and miners’ needs would be more easily fulfilled. The companies were fulfilling appropriate resource claims through CSR and in the process highlighted the failings of the unions and government (Rajak 2011). This discourse worked to justify to miners and to Zambians a pattern of accumulation where little wealth remained in the country. It drew from assumptions about the inherent corruption of Zambians and the market rationality of corporate actors, even as it reinforced these. This was most overt when negotiations between the Deputy Research Director and Head of the Chamber of Mines led to reinterpreting the former’s advancement as ‘corruption’.

Conclusion

This article has challenged works which present union corruption as a substantive cause of low wages and underdevelopment in Zambia, and worldwide (Lee 2017); and to the development practitioner community built around combating corruption (Kasser-Tee 2020; Papyrakis, Rieger, and Gilberthorpe 2016). Its purpose has not been to question the existence of corruption in Zambia’s mining unions, but to foreground the causes and effects of convolving poor wages, underdevelopment and union corruption. Some labour leaders seemingly lacked ‘a heart for the workers’ and many profited from their position between miners and HR. However, national and international factors primarily drove Zambians to experience their diminishing wages and working conditions as caused by corruption. Narratives of corrupt Global South institutions impeding the efficient management of market-liberal corporations were, at least in part, the latest manifestation of a long-running negative belonging that explains Zambian poverty through Global South moral failure (Muir 2016; Larmer 2005). Copperbelt moral economies built upon hierarchical resource redistribution, were struggling with the valorisation of entrepreneurship and the importance of brokerage as a source of wealth for Zambian entrepreneurs (Haynes 2017; McNamara 2021b). Globally, workers consistently complain about union corruption (Keskula and Sanchez 2019); blaming individuated yet pervasive corruption enables the assertions of strength needed to motivate unionism, despite consistently poor outcomes. These factors reinforced each other, creating a mining industry hampered by ‘corrupt’ unions full of Zambians who ‘loved money too much’. This weakened organised labour, discouraging the legal changes needed to assist unions in negotiating higher wages; and absolving mining companies from their role in corrupt activities and unjust working conditions.

Co-created with, and rendered blameless through, the ‘corrupt unions’ were shareholder driven corporations. These corporations claimed to blindly follow economic logics that necessitated low wages and tax-takes, this made their actions inevitable and morally neutral. I have shown instead that these corporations, and actors associated with them, operated within and influenced Zambia’s moral economy. In this economy competing claims from workers, the government and company representatives were negotiated, with these negotiations drawing from and altering international models associated with shareholder primacy (Appel 2019; Behrends, Park, and Rottenburg 2014). Negotiations responded to ‘needs’ – legitimate claims from workers, the community, the nation and shareholders, yet corruption diminished the legitimacy of the claimed needs of workers and the government. This then justified the models through which workers and the state are unfavourably incorporated into extraction of Zambia’s resources. While discursively diametrically opposed to this ‘corruption’, CSR existed in the same moral framework (see Rajak 2011). By supplanting the union and government in the provision of services, CSR legitimised company control over resources and further lowered workers’ expectations of what could be achieved through collective action or state intervention.

This article has focused on the material effects of corruption discourses. For development practitioners who work in an anti-corruption space, it encourages re-considering the promises that they are making (even unconsciously) about the effects of their anti-corruption work, and how these promises encourage over-attributing under-development to Global South corruption (Harrison 2007).³ For unionists, and those who write about them, it encourages a cautiousness in attributing outcomes to unionist corruption, which appeared to be much more of an affect, rather than a cause of labour’s neoliberal disempowerment (Fraser 2010; Lee 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This article was written as part of the WORKinMINING project (https://www.workinmining.ulg.ac.be). The project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 646802). The ideas developed in this article reflect only the author's view. The ERC is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Notes on contributors

Thomas McNamara

Thomas McNamara is a lecturer in development studies at La Trobe University, and the Deputy Director of the Master of International Development. He also holds an FNRS mandate (N. 34785392) at the University of Liege, where this research began through an ERC project. His primary research interest is how Global South economies are shaped by and guide affective relationships and moral norms, especially norms and narratives relating to ‘development’.

Notes

1 See Dolber and Kesselring (2019) for the models through which Zambian resources become Swiss services.

2 Donor governments and extractive corporations were crucial to this corruption but are frequently ignored. Vedanta Minerals brought half of Konkola Copper Mines, for 25 million USD. Its CEO was later caught boasting that the mine had never provided annual profits of less than 500 million USD, despite rarely recording any taxable profit. Glencore’s Mopani Copper Mines has been accused of using transfer pricing to avoid taxation and Glencore has paid settlements in other jurisdictions for tax evasion (Dolber and Kesselring 2019).

3 This is a particularly pertinent critique for the EITI; a body that unequally incorporate Global Mining Corporations, weak Global South states and civil society organisations that are only viable through the EITI’s existence. While nominally aimed at ensuring that companies are paying tax, without data to compare the tax paid to potential payments under other tax schemes, the EITI serves to confirm that amounts of money that seem large are paid, and encourages asking governments where this has gone and accusing them of corruption or mismanagement.