Go to AfricaBib home

Go to AfricaBib home AfricaBib Go to database home

bibliographic database
Line
Previous page New search

The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here

Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Disputing the Machines: Scientific Management and the Transformation of the Work Routine at the Union Miniere Du Haut-Katanga, 1918-1930
Author:Higginson, JohnISNI
Year:1988
Periodical:African Economic History
Volume:17
Pages:1-21
Language:English
Geographic terms:Congo (Democratic Republic of)
Belgium
Subjects:colonialism
labour relations
mining
Labor and Employment
Economics and Trade
History and Exploration
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/3601332
Abstract:This paper examines an African world of work, deference and resistance that originated in the smelting foundries and factories of Katanga Province, Belgian Congo (presently Shaba Province, Zaire) between 1918 and 1930. In this brief period, the Union minière du Haut Katanga withdrew from the migrant labour system in southern Africa and sharply increased its share of world copper production. This seminal period grew out of the imperatives imposed upon the mining company by the global recession of 1922. The paper is particularly concerned with the extent to which the Union minière inadvertently enhanced the social awareness of its African workers by attempting to stabilize the work routine. It is also concerned with the degree to which the mining company sought to reach further under the workers' caps while tying their hands more fastly to new pacesetting machinery that came to articulate the work routine at its more strategic work sites. It shows that the most important catalyst for worker unrest was the increasing divergence between the basis of authority in the industry and the changing requirements of production. Notes, ref.
Views
Cover