16:00 - 17:30
Room: Aston Webb Theatre – G33
Stream: Unearthing New Scholarship on the Central African Copperbelt
Chair/s:
Jennifer Chibamba Chansa
“Little Lawyers”: HR Managers as interface between foreign capital and domestic labour markets
Emma Lochery
University of Liège, Liege

Since privatisation of the state-owned Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines in the late 1990s and early 2000s, foreign investors have imported a variety of management practices to Zambia’s mining sector. Companies deploy strategies of subcontracting and mechanisation that have reshaped the mining sector internationally. While companies have adapted management models to meet Zambian legal requirements and longstanding norms of employment, they have also challenged and changed norms and rules.

This paper examines how mining companies interface with employment laws and norms in Zambia by focusing on one group of Zambian professionals responsible for mediating the relationship: mining companies’ human resource (HR) managers. HR managers’ duties are to advise management, negotiate with trade unions, defend companies’ employment decisions in court, and deal with worker concerns on a day-to-day basis. They act as agents for one principal, the mining company that employs them. However, in the media, Zambian government statements, and even amongst trade unionists and workers, Zambian HR managers are called upon to act as guardians of Zambian labour law and industrial harmony.

I look at how HR managers navigate these expectations, demonstrating how their status as members of a professional group and mastery of Zambian employment law enables companies to exert control over the labour market while putting HR managers themselves in a precarious and conflictual position. I examine how HR managers mediate between their position in management and desire to address workers’ demands. I argue that the moral positioning of HR managers has been shifting over time, from an emphasis on overseeing employee welfare to a more singular focus on production.


Reference:
Tu-A54 Copperbelt 3-P-004
Presenter/s:
Emma Lochery
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Aston Webb Theatre – G33
Chair/s:
Jennifer Chibamba Chansa
Date:
Tuesday, 11 September
Time:
16:45 - 17:00
Session times:
16:00 - 17:30