Indian Labour Dispute at KCM

The Times of Zambia (yesterday and today ) reported a fascinating story of an industrial dispute between ‘Onshore Construction Ltd’ a firm contracted to Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) to construct the multi-billion Kwacha Nchanga smelter in Chingola and manual labourers shipped in from India to work on the plant.

On Saturday, 360 Onshore Construction employees, all from India, downed tools and staged a protest demanding better conditions of service.

The Times reported that Mr Subhas Chandra Mallick the group spokesperson said the employees were working 12 hours per day and were paid only K1million per month. He said the employees complained because 60 of the workers were housed in a three-bedroomed guesthouse and were made to share one toilet and bathroom.

"The employees are demanding leave days bonus, the actual bonus, their salaries to be paid in Indian currency, and are claiming that they are not given good food. They are not entitled to tea break or lunch break but worked for 12 hours… We are not given medical claims, we have no identity cards to access the plant and we can't go out of Chingola because we do not have immigration cards which management has withheld from us. We signed some agreement forms but they have not been given to us,” Mr Mallick said. He said the employees were working for 26 days in a month but only 20 days were paid to them, the situation he described as theft of their money.

The strike started on Saturday when the workers demanded for dialogue with management but were denied an audience. They chose to gather at Chingola Mine Club to coerce management to meet them on the way forward. Chingola police faced resistance when they broke up the meeting claiming it was an illegal gathering without police permission.

The company originally said they would not succumb to employees' demands of better conditions of service because it was spending more than it was recovering on each employee. Onshore administrative manager Iyer Ramachandran said management was giving payments according to the agreement which the company made with the employees prior to their coming to Zambia. Mr Iyer said the firm was spending over K10 million on each employee to enable him travel to Zambia, acquire a work permit and other documentation. He said the money spent on each employee was not recovered. He said he had earlier told the employees that whoever was aggrieved was free to go back to India.

Now 250 workers have apparently chosen to do just that. One of the employees is quoted in The Times today as saying 70 per cent of the employees had chosen to go back to India instead of being enslaved by Onshore (I can’t help wondering about this bit of the story. Saying they chose to go home could be a convenient way for the company to sack ‘troublesome’ workers rather than deal with their legitimate complaints). Ramachandran told The Times that the company would now employ local people to replace them.

Interestingly, the worker’s representative Mr Mallick called for intervention from the Zambian Government so that the Indian government could be aware of situation.

What hopes might Indian workers hold out of such an outcome? Well, they seem so far to be enjoying greater protection from local authorities than from the national government. At a local level, The Post report that the company may face legal action following public health concerns involving its expatriate workers. Chingola council town clerk Charles Sambondu said yesterday “I summoned the management of Onshore and told them that on health grounds, this situation was unacceptable,” Sambondu said. “I warned them of prosecution under the public health Act if they did not adhere to our directives.” He said his officers inspected about five houses in Chingola, where they established that each of them was housing about 60 people. “People in the neighbourhood have been complaining bitterly. These people are using those hospital pans to answer the call of nature and they dispose them in the drainages,” Sambondu said.

On the national level on the other hand, The Post reports that two Copperbelt Patriotic Front MPs have raised concerns in Parliament about the motive behind the government’s decision to grant temporary work permits to Indian nationals to work on the smelter. Immigration Department spokesperson Mulako Mbangweta said the over 300 Indians were issued with temporary work permits to allow them work on some specialised aspects of the KCM project for a period of three months. Labour and Social Security Deputy Minister, Austin Liato said in an interview yesterday there was nothing wrong with KCM engaging Onshore, "We are more concerned with the permanent jobs that the mining companies would create for the local people than how these companies bring in others on contract basis. As a ministry we would want more jobs created for the Zambians by the mining companies and these should be on permanent basis. That is the long-term investment that we are interested in," Mr Liato said.

Given the very high percentage of jobs being taken on the Copperbelt by sub-contracting firms, this seems a surprisingly lax approach to local job creation. Of course it is laudable to aim for the creation of a maximum number of permanent contracts. However, while the legal framework continues to provide very weak incentives for companies to do so, surely protecting even casual jobs for local labour has merit.

The story is particularly interesting to me because there are significant tensions on the Copperbelt, and indeed in Zambia more generally, about the importation of foreign labourers to work in Zambian industries, particularly those, like KCM, with Indian or Chinese owners. The assumption, commonly made by Zambians, is that these foreign workers enjoy much better terms of employment than local workers and that the interests of the two groups are in conflict.

The assumption of higher wages has two aspects. Firstly, the mines, historically run by white settler populations typically paid white, and ‘expatriate’ workers higher wages and special allowances. It is still true that foreign owned mine companies bring in their own management staff and that they are housed and paid better than locals, causing significant resentments. However, in the case of labourers on roads, in factories and in the construction industries, there is little chance that the reason companies bring in such labour is that they cannot get skilled Zambians. Rather, foreign labourers, as in much of the world, are brought to Zambia precisely because they can be exploited more thoroughly than locals – this seems to be the case in this instance. The workers are not protected by their own national laws, and they seem to receive minimal protection from the Zambian state.

Personally, I would love to see (maybe I am a dreamer!) a statement from the mineworker’s unions and local PF MPs, not condemning the failure of the Government to keep out migrant labour, but condemning the company, and acting in solidarity with the Indian workers. Why? Because the interests of Zambian and foreign workers are the same: they both need effective Government regulation of multinational firms such that companies cannot play off two groups of labourers, one against the other, driving wages and conditions down by forcing them to compete. At the root of the issue in the Zambian case, it seems to me, is inadequate labour legislation that allows for ever increasing numbers of temporary and contracted labourers, of whatever nationality, to be employed on such radically different terms from the permanent, unionised workforce.