Flexibility or exploitation?

Jessica Smith and Frederico Helfgott

Jessica Smith has a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research addresses gender and kinship in Wyoming coal-mining families. Her email is Jessica. Mary.Smith@colorado.edu. Federico Helfgott is a PhD candidate in the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. He is currently doing field and archival research for his dissertation on transformations in labour and community relations in Perus mines. His email is federimi@umich.edu.

Corporate social responsibility and the perils of universalization A defining feature of contemporary capitalism is the restructuring of production along the lines of what many have called flexibilization. Since the 1990s, anthropologists such as Emily Martin, Elizabeth Dunn and Sylvia Yanagisako have critiqued this reorganization of the labour process, especially its accompanying shifts in workers sense of personhood and the conditions in which they labour. The 1990s, however, were also characterized by the global rise of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, as executives sought to deflect criticisms of their business practices by presenting their operations as socially and environmentally responsible. In recent years anthropologists have theorized CSR as a key site for the interface between corporations and civil society (Welker 2009) as well as a corporate strategy to neutralize criticism (e.g. Benson and Kirsch 2010). Yet even though these two developments the flexibilization of labour and the rise of CSR emerged at about the same time, few scholars and anthropologists have considered them together (see Benson 2008 and Cloud 2007 for two exceptions). In this article, we examine the mining industry in order to explore the potential contradiction between the drive to rationalize labour and reduce the employers financial responsibility for the workforce that characterizes contemporary capitalism, on the one hand, and the parallel pressure on corporations to demonstrate their social responsibility, including their treatment of workers, on the other. We argue that the process of universalization by which we mean the way in which capitals interests come to subsume a range of issues raised by production and consumption allows this contradiction to remain latent. In the case of the Peruvian mining industry we examine here, the process of universalization results both from labours general loss of visibility and from corporate strategies to manage the workforce, impose the requirement of flexibilization, and control the politics of labour. We conclude by suggesting that academics and activists have been influenced by this process in their analyses of the mining industry as a unitary, external force confronting communities. Our analysis focuses on two sites in the Peruvian mining industry. Around the world, sharp criticisms of the social and environmental impacts of mining have prompted the industrys top transnational executives as well as local managers to formulate CSR policies, practices, discourses and reports. The Peruvian case provides a crucial perspective on this development because the mining industry in Peru has expanded rapidly since the 1990s amidst vociferous opposition, with widely reported conflicts in places like Tambogrande and Yanacocha. Most academic investigations of corporate responsibility in the mining industry focus on worst-case scenarios such as these, leaving the analysis of so-called success stories to the companies themselves. To address this gap, we selected two mines in Peru with moderately positive reputations for responsibility and relatively less conflictive relations with surrounding communities, Colquebamba and Chalcomayo (both pseudonyms). Our justification for focusing on these two sites for this article is twofold. On the one hand, we want to show that the developments we note here are not limited to a single company or site. On the other, this approach allows us to compare two sites in two different cultural areas (central and southern Peru) with different degrees of local mining tradition. Our

Fig. 1. Most company CSR initiatives focus on agriculture and ranching. This poster at Chalcomayos booth at a local fair states: We are committed to working with social responsibility and participating in the sustainable development of communities. Mining and ranching together for development.

research involved dozens of formal interviews with company personnel, current and former workers and community members, as well as informal conversations, visits to production sites, and consultation of written materials. Colquebamba and Chalcomayo Around 1550 individuals work at Colquebamba, a medium-sized underground mine located in the traditional mining heartland of central Peru. The mine produces silver and zinc, and smaller amounts of lead, copper and gold.1 Though the current company arrived in the last decade, the mine operated under a different administration throughout most of the 20th century, cultivating a strong mining tradition in the area. During much of this time local people combined mining work with raising sheep, llamas and alpacas; it is still common to see shepherds guiding herds briskly past tailings dams. Census data indicate that today around 60 per cent of the districts employment is tied to mining in some way. Others work in commerce, transport and education. Over 10,000 people live in the district, both on small rural ranches called estancias and in the main town, which has boomed since 2005, partly owing to increased mining production. As in many places in Peru, mine properties are interspersed with land belonging to comunidades campesinas (peasant communities) formal, legally recognized entities representing families that own the land in common but mostly work it separately. These communities increased their landholdings after the agrarian reform of the 1960s dissolved large private estates. The larger of the two peasant communities in the area has around 1400 registered members plus unregistered family members. About 140 of its members work at Colquebamba, with others at other local mines. Many community members hire shepherds both relatives and people from poorer regions to tend their animals while they work at the mines. While many residents criticize the
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Fig. 2. Alpaca graze in a pasture located near one of Colquebambas tailings dams. The dramatic expansion of mining in the 1990s means that mining activity and peasant production are in ever closer proximity to one another.

current company for providing fewer benefits to workers than previous operators, most acknowledge that it is fulfilling at least some of its agreements with the community. Chalcomayo is a large open-pit mine in the southern highlands that produces copper cathodes and concentrates.2 The mine is located in an area that locals have historically used for raising sheep and cattle along with craftwork and the cultivation of potatoes and grains. Fewer people here combined agricultural and mine work than in Colquebamba; before Chalcomayo, only one mine operated in this area for a few decades and with only a few hundred workers. Another difference between the two sites is that whereas Colquebambas population gradually shifted from Quechua to Spanish over the course of the 20th century, Chalcomayo remains a primarily Quechua-speaking area, though with significant growth in the use of Spanish in recent years. In the 1970s the state acquired the rights to the Chalcomayo deposit, and in the 1980s it began expropriating land from the surrounding peasant communities. Since privatization in the mid-1990s the mine has been operated by three separate transnational mining firms, the first two of which expanded its scope by pressuring the communities to sell their land at low prices. During the past three decades conflicts over land and over the distribution of the mines wealth, coupled with accusations of human rights abuses and environmental damage, have spurred different groups of local people to organize and ally themselves with national and transnational NGOs; in their protests they have taken over the mine several times, and pressured the company to make a greater financial contribution to the area. These efforts have culminated in a formalized dialogue structure unprecedented in Peru that includes representatives from the six surrounding peasant communities, the corporation, and NGOs. The current company has continued to participate in this dialogue and to attempt to comply with the agreements. Local residents, however, are frustrated that one of the largest lingering sources of contention the quality and quantity of mine work has yet to be broached, though NGO leaders anticipate that it might be put on the table in the coming year. Restructuring labour The importance of labour in these negotiations points to local frustrations with shifts in the organization of labour in the Peruvian mining industry since the 1990s. Whereas during most of the 20th century upwards of 1500 stable, full-time workers and their families formed a community in the large camp complex at Colquebamba, all but 20 had been retired by the end of the 1990s, when most of the camps were also dismantled. The proportion of workers employed directly in stable jobs has climbed back up

somewhat from this low point, but the present organization of labour still looks sharply different from the past. Local residents talk about these developments as a change from the days of what they call all payroll (pura planilla) to the current system, which they say is all subcontracted (pura contrata). Company officials give more moderate yet illustrative figures: 30 per cent are stable, payroll workers, 30 per cent are on the company payroll but with temporary contracts, and 40 per cent work for one of nearly 30 contracting companies and have no direct labour relationship with the company.3 While payroll workers are primarily engaged in the extraction of mineral from the face, subcontracted employees are charged with the often more dangerous work of opening up new tunnels. The early 1990s also saw dramatic changes at Chalcomayo, including a reduction in the workforce from around 1400 to slightly under 800 as part of the privatization plan. Today, 1400 people again work at Chalcomayo (between six and eight per cent of whom are women), but only 60 per cent are directly employed by the company as payroll workers. Among these direct workers, the proportion of those who are on payroll but under short-term contracts was 10 per cent in 2006 and about 20 per cent in 2007 and 2008, according to company reports. Of the current total workforce, around 40 per cent is subcontracted. The great majority of locals working for the mine do so through one of about 50 subcontracting companies. Both mines also reflect the widespread shifts in work schedules that became common in Peruvian mines in the 1990s. Most miners work a rotating series of 12-hour shifts called the systems (los sistemas). At Colquebamba, for instance, the majority work 14 shifts in a row and then rest for seven. Engineers, on the other hand, work 10 days and rest for five. When asked why these new schedules were adopted, officials at both companies suggest that they benefit workers, who are able to spend their free days with their families and live in larger towns with purportedly better schools and services than the previous camps. Indeed, families have mostly disappeared from the camps at both mines. The hospital at Colquebamba was demolished in the 1990s along with camp dwellings, and the school is now used as a housing facility for one of the contracting companies. The camp school at Chalcomayo is now a warehouse, while outside the camp fence the com-

FREDERICO HELFGOTT

Fig. 3. The authors pose with a water truck, one of the large pieces of equipment used in open-pit mines such as Chalcomayo.

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1. The primary destinations for Perus silver and zinc are the United States, Japan and China. 2. Perus copper is primarily exported to China, the United States, Japan and Canada. 3. Many local people give much lower figures for stable, payroll workers than these company statistics. 4. We recently saw this process at work when banks were bailed out during the recession because they were too big to fail. 5. This development corroborates Rajaks (2008) observation that CSR discourses can entrench inequalities between corporate and community actors and disqualify claims to entitlement. The company strategy of promising good, stable jobs to gain local support for their operations but then failing to follow through is common throughout the industry. 6. This is true to a lesser degree in the literatures on other mining contexts because the incorporation of locals into the workforce varies greatly from country to country. In contrast to Peru, the percentage of local mineworkers in places such as Papua New Guinea is very low, which translates into very different labour relations.
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pany has built but does not manage new educational facilities for the region as part of their CSR programmes and agreements with regional authorities. In both places, workers from the nearest communities live at home and commute daily, while those who live farther away travel back to their homes only for their days off. While company officials praise this model for promoting less dependence than previous ones, local people there are nostalgic about the days when the company provided them with benefits such as housing, education, health care and fuel for cooking. They sadly remember the 1990s as a time when workers and their families had to leave the camps they had come to think of as home. When asked what benefits the new labour system brings to the company, one official explained: We have a worker who is more committed to the company because he has just spent time with his family. He added: It saves us a social burden [carga social] that we would incur. This social burden, he explained, pertained under the old schedule not only because the company provided schools and other facilities, but also because workers were around at times when they were not truly needed. In contrast, under the sistemas their time can be rationalized and economized. Productivity also increases under the new system, he argued, because with less frequent shift changes there is less dead time. Despite the officials testaments to the advantages of the new labour system, it presents social and physical stresses for miners and their families. Wives of local workers at Colquebamba explained that their husbands leave home as early as 5.30 am and then return very tired around 9.00 pm. They said that their fathers who worked eight-hour shifts as miners did not use to be as exhausted as their husbands currently are. An official at Colquebamba argued that the long shift was not tiring to workers because it is the estimated time that a worker can work. Another countered that since miners do not work the full 12 hours they take 45 minutes for a meal break along with an hour to enter and leave the mine they should not be exhausted. Yet another blamed tiredness on bad habits among nightshift workers, such as going to play soccer at the end of their shift rather than going straight to sleep, something the company tries to monitor. At Chalcomayo, a manager argued that miners do not become exhausted because they finish their 12 hours, receive their food and all they do

it is go to sleep because they have no other activities that require physical exercise. Though some workers appreciate the complete days off with family offered by the system, many criticize the homogenization of time that eliminates overtime as well as Sunday and holiday pay. One worker said that under the system that now operates nationwide, in part [the companies are] violating labour rights, especially that a Sunday should be paid at 100% plus [the equivalent of] one holiday something that they, under the system, no longer get. Its like any regular day. These changes have been accompanied by a significant change in the role of organized labour at these two sites, mirroring trends in the Peruvian mining industry more broadly. Until the early 1990s, a militant union represented almost all workers at Colquebamba; many of the retired miners remember the marchas de sacrificio (sacrifice marches) in which they walked over a hundred miles to Lima during strikes. As directly employed workers were replaced with subcontracted personnel in the 1990s and 2000s, the union dwindled to fewer than 20 members, the minimum required for collective bargaining. A few years later some of the workers tried to revive this union by uniting direct and subcontracted workers along with white-collar employees. The contracts of temporary workers involved in this drive were not renewed by the company, so the effort petered out. At Chalcomayo, company literature states that all employees are free to join a union of their choice, but again, subcontracted workers are excluded from union membership in practice. Slightly over half of the direct workforce, but only around 30 per cent of the total workforce, belongs to the union. The perils of universalization Both mining companies in Peru and no doubt many others around the world find themselves in a precarious position since the major reorganizations of labour described here could potentially give the lie to their claims to responsibility. The features of contract work that make it the epitome of flexibilization its temporary nature, lack of benefits and increased risks strongly contradict the companies stated claim to be responsible employers. The companies suspension of most social services for the families of employees, as well as their use of demanding shift schedules, further calls into question their commitment to social responsibility. Company officials are nevertheless able to circumvent this contradiction by making the specific interests of capital represent the mine as a whole a process that can be termed universalization (Cloud 2009, Eagleton 1991). To some degree, universalization is always at work in capitalism, as societys interest becomes more and more dependent on the interests of capital so that the latter come to represent the whole.4 This process masks the tensions between capital and labour, as the goal of universalization is to make sectional interests invisible as such (Cloud 2007: 220). In the particular case of Peruvian mining, universalization happens in two complementary ways. On the one hand, there has been a qualitative change in the visibility of mining labour since the 1990s. Whereas before that period Peruvian mining unions were strong and militant, subcontracting and its accompanying lack of job stability have since muted overt labour conflict, removing a key source of visibility for miners. At the same time, increased conflict between company and community shift attention away from labour and toward community relations issues. In the case of Peru, while one form of collective organization the labour union has lost much of its force, placebased organizations such as peasant communities remain
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Fig. 4. This statue of a driller celebrates the rich tradition of mine labour in the central highlands. 22

Fig. 5. These copper cathodes are produced by miners at Chalcomayo for international export.

More than anything, I worry about work. Being young, I want to work, being a young man, to move forward. And for my children also to move forward [] Since I am from here, a person from Chalcomayo. Not just me, there are many of us, many people. We who are also titulares [registered heads of community households]. On my side, nobody works, in my family nobody works as a stable worker, as a permanent worker, nobody works [] Subcontracting is not for a long time. Its three months, six months. Like that. Its also rotating. And, since there were agreements, everyone is going to work, thats what we hoped. But up to now they havent complied.

Benson, Peter. 2008. Good clean tobacco: Philip Morris, biocapitalism and the social course of stigma in North Carolina. American Ethnologist 35(3): 357-379. and Kirsch, Stuart 2010 (forthcoming). Capitalism and the politics of resignation. Current Anthropology. Cloud, Dana 2007. Corporate social responsibility as oxymoron: Universalization and exploitation at Boeing. In: May, S., Cheney, G. and Roper, J. (eds), The debate over corporate social responsibility, pp. 219-231. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collins, Jane 2003. Threads: Gender, labor and power in the global apparel industry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eagleton, Terry 1991. Ideology: An introduction. London: Verso. Nader, Laura 1997. Controlling processes: Tracing the dynamic components of power. Current Anthropology 38(5): 711-738. Rajak, Dinah 2008. Uplift and empower: The market, the gift and corporate social responsibility on South Africas platinum belt. Research in Economic Anthropology 28: 297-324. Yakovleva, Natalia 2005. Corporate social responsibility in the mining industries. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Welker, Marina, 2009. Corporate security begins in the community: Mining, the corporate social responsibility industry, and environmental advocacy in Indonesia. Cultural Anthropology 24(1): 142179.

strong. The locus of activism, conflict and visibility and therefore of CSR has shifted accordingly. Thus if CSR is a response of mining companies to the environmental and social concerns of their stakeholders (Yakovleva 2005: 69), then workers as workers have lost some of their status as a particular kind of stakeholders. On the other hand, since labour cannot become completely invisible, company officials also discursively universalize their interests by representing the interests of management and labour as harmonious (cf. Nader 1997): miners are portrayed as being of one heart with capital, without any antagonistic relationship to it. One way officials do this is by arguing that the new systems are better because the older camp model promoted dependency, inefficiency, drunkenness and detachment from family. In both interviews and company documents, they highlight the enviable treatment of stable direct workers, including relatively high wages and progressive safety and medical programmes, while glossing over the fact that most miners are temporary or subcontracted workers with no job security. Officials also argue that they now have a positive, collaborative relationship with workers. Within the worksite itself, worker identification with the company is encouraged by practices that promote a more unitary corporate identity, such as Chalcomayos elimination of overt distinctions of rank in dining facilities and hard hat colours. But more often, officials create the appearance of shared interests by failing to mention labour in interviews or published materials, focusing instead on environmental management and community relations. Most social responsibility activities at both Colquebamba and Chalcomayo focus on ranching and agricultural development, education, and infrastructure, excluding questions about the quality and quantity of work. Yet universalization remains incomplete at the local level, as people bring labour issues into discussions about corporate responsibility. At Colquebamba, local residents criticize the reduction in services provided to workers, and calls for more stable jobs for local people figure prominently in the peasant communitys demands. At Chalcomayo, peasant community members uniformly argue that they have a right to stable, payroll jobs precisely because the company uses lands that were once theirs; they portray the low availability of such jobs as a betrayal of past land-for-jobs agreements. 5 One community member, whose house used to be where the pit is now located, and who worked as a subcontractor at the time of the interview, explained it thus:

In this observation, as in much local discourse, a distinction is made between subcontracted jobs and real jobs. In both research sites, addressing labour-related concerns is seen as a necessary part of responsible company behaviour. Subcontracting may enjoy significant cultural hegemony at the level of international economic policy, but here, even when people accept it with resignation, they do not see it as anything other than a mechanism set up to benefit the company. The paradox is that while subcontracting potentially discredits claims to corporate responsibility by making labour exploitation more obvious, it simultaneously diminishes workers political power because it cripples unions. Thus the contradiction between corporate social responsibility and labour flexibilization is always there as a potential, as is clear at the local level, but it remains dormant at national and global levels so long as universalization does its work. Our concern is that at these broader levels, academics, activists and NGOs have largely reproduced the process of universalization: whereas before the 1990s mining meant both companies and workers, today it seems to mean only companies and communities, with labour subsumed within companies. This trend is particularly stark in the literature on Peru, where a rich tradition of scholarship on miners has given way to an almost exclusive focus on community, environmental and cultural issues.6 This shift in Peru and in other places is partly due to academics following trends in activism. As the locus of prominent conflicts in the mining industry globally has shifted from labour to environmental issues, academics have largely shifted their scholarship as well. Although labour conflicts played a central role in the development of the CSR movement in the 1990s, especially in the textile industry (Collins 2003), this was not the case for mining. Yet excluding labour from appraisals of mining by academics and NGOs wrongly portrays mines as unitary entities that are external to communities, rather than partially constituted by them. Because communities are often providers of a large part of the labour force, labour issues are automatically community issues. Moreover, these accounts fail to recognize a key contradiction of contemporary capitalism between the impetus to flexibilize labour and the increasing demand to demonstrate social responsibility. We call for scholars to remain attentive to how discourses of corporate social responsibility coexist with the increased precariousness of employment and intensified pressures on and exploitation of workers much as Peter Benson (2008) illustrates in his research on the tobacco industry. In the case of both tobacco and mining, recent literature tends to focus on issues other than the relations of production consumer health in the case of tobacco, environmental impact and community relations in the case of mining even though labour restructuring has been dramatic in both. Research about corporations and social responsibility must draw attention to the continuing importance of labour for negotiations among companies, communities and employees over what responsibility is and should be. l
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