From Towns to Hotels: Changes in Mining Accommodation Regimes and Their Effects on Labour Union Strategies
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12202 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Author | Omar Manky |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12202
55:2 June 2017 0007–1080 pp. 295–320
From Towns to Hotels: Changes in
Mining Accommodation Regimes and
Their Effects on Labour Union Strategies
Omar Manky
Abstract
A radical shift in the spatial organization of the global mining industry has
occurred over the last three decades. I argue that the shift from the traditional
mining town, where workers lived close to the mine, to the new model of long
distance commuting, where workers are transported in from distant cities for
their shifts, transforms labour union strategies. Drawing on an in-depth case
study from Peru,I show that long distance commuting reduces workers’ capacity
to mobilize locally by aecting the dynamics in three social spaces: the mining
camp, the home and the union hall. Moreover, and in contrast to prior research,
I detail how mining unions have developed new compensatory strategies to
maintain their bargaining power.
1. Introduction
Over the last 30 years, mining companies have transformed the way they
organize workers’housing arrangements. From Northern Canada to southern
Chile, from the Peruvian Andes to the Australian desert, the traditional
mining town model is being replaced by long distance commuting (LDC) —
a regime that transports urban workers to the mines and provides food and
lodging at the work site for a fixed number of days, after which they return
home (Shrimpton and Storey 1992). The disappearance of the mining town,
the iconic model through which companies accommodated mineworkers
during the twentieth century,shows that increased labour mobility exists even
in natural resource extraction industries that are fixed to specific geographic
locations.
Although recent studies have dealt with the eects of LDC on workers’
private lives and local development, no study has yet examined its impact
Omar Manky is at Cornell University.
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2016 John Wiley& Sons Ltd/London School of Economics. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
296 British Journal of Industrial Relations
on labour relations. Using an inductive, qualitative approach, this article
focuses on how LDC alters labour union strategies. I argue that LDC
spatially separates the sites of mineral production from the sites of social
reproduction, therebyunder mining predominantlyworkplace-based forms of
social relations and labour organizing. This shift, in turn, has pushed unions
to reconfigure their strategies; ratherthan carrying out extensive and frequent
strikes in the workplace, they instead focus their energies on coalition building
beyond the confines of the mining camp. Thus, my research diers from prior
studies in that I explain the mechanisms through which LDC has aected
labour unions and also specify how mining unions arerevising their strategies.
In the next section, I review the relevantprior literature, then proceed with a
discussion of my methodology, a description of the Peruvian mining industry
and an analysis of the results of the case study. The last section discusses this
article’s limitations and its implications for future research.
2. Literatu re review
The introduction of LDC involves a transformation in how workers’ lives are
spatially and temporally organized.1Under the mining town model, houses
were locatedclose to t he mine,thus allowing workers to return to their families
every night after their shifts. The spatial dynamics of LDC, on the other
hand, require mining companies to build hotels on site for their commuting
workers. Typically, the workers’ families do not accompany them to the sites,
remaining in cities far away from the mine. Because companies find it cheaper
to consolidate shift changes and because workers prefer having more days at
home between commutes, miners work 12 rather than 8 hours a day.2Table 1
summarizes the dierences between LDC and the mining town model.
These changes should be understood within the broader context of
capitalist production. As economic geographers have suggested, capitalist
production not only occupies a physical space in the landscape but also
actively produces particular sites of capital accumulation (Lefebvre 1991;
Massey 2005). With regard to labour, firms must be able to gather a suitable
workforce to produce at these particular sites (McGrath-Camp et al. 2010).
When one looks at most studies about mining companies’ labour politics,
however, the relevance of spatial configurations to capitalist production is
seldom made explicit. That relevance is hard to deny when one considers
the centralizing mechanisms used to house and control migrant workers in
the early twentieth century, specifically the African compound (Burawoy 1976;
Crush 1994) and the Latin American enganche (DeWind 1975; Laite 1981).
Furthermore, when technological advances demanded a more trained and
stable workforce in the mid-twentieth century, companies began to build
towns that allowed them to control both production and social reproduction
(Borges and Torres 2012).3In Latin America, mining towns essentially became
spaces where thousands of peasants and their families were proletarian
subjects disciplined under a capitalist logic (Garc´
es 2003; Klubock 1998).
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2016 John Wiley& Sons Ltd/London School of Economics.
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