Raw encounters: Chinese managers, African workers, and the politics of casualization in Africa's Chinese enclaves

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Book chapter

Title:	Raw encounters: Chinese managers, African workers, and the politics of casualization in Africa's Chinese enclaves
Author:	Lee, Ching Kwan
Book title:	Zambia, mining, and neoliberalism: boom and bust on the globalized Copperbelt
Year:	2010
Pages:	127-153
Language:	English
Geographic terms:	Zambia Tanzania China
Subjects:	foreign investments mining labour relations
Abstract:	This chapter examines one of the preeminent logics of global capital flow-the pursuit of flexible labor regimes, as a window through which to explore the interaction between Chinese investments and African communities. Casualization, alternatively termed 'informalization', 'precarious employment', and 'nonstandard jobs' in the academic literature, has become a global problem, afflicting even the advanced industrialized world. In Africa it is being discussed with great urgency among trade unionists whenever Chinese investment is the subject, even though casualization plagues all kinds of foreign investment projects. This study analyzes the respective 'politics of casualization' in the Chambishi Mine on the Copperbelt, Zambia, and the Tanzania-China Friendship Textile Mills in the port city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]