Preliminary Programme

The underground mining in Potosi was a male sphere. Women were forbidden, even to get inside the mines (until recently) because it was thought that they would cause misfortunes. Nevertheless, women were involved in one of the most important process: to choose and to select valuable material from discarded tailings (they were known as palliris) outside the mines. This implies that mining is a complex process with a labour and gender division that has been under looked and under estimated. Women appeared also as owners of rudimentary mills (trapiches) where the ore was processed, selling different amounts of silver to the Spanish Authorities. Finally, in Potosi, that grew as an important city in close relationship to the exploitation of silver, women were actively involved in the petty trade and in the open markets of the city. In this paper we will examine these different activities, trying to analyze and to link them with the perceptions and representations about women's role. They were somehow the "informal workers" of the time: receiving less wages, they were always present but not always recognized as such. (Show less)

Women in Zambia's copper mining region, the Zambian Copperbelt have since the establishment in the industry in the 1920's played important economic roles in subsidising wages earned predominantly by men working in mining. From the 1920s to the 1950s when their presence in the mining townships was controlled, they occupied themselves with economic activity that was largely informal. Following policies to advance the interests of African workers from the mid 1950's, and expanded at Zambia's independence in 1964, a few women where employed by the mining companies in sectors that dealt with worker welfare. During the slow economic decline that hit the copper industry in Zambia from the 1980s to the sharp downturn in the mid 1990s when the industry was privatised following widespread implementation of structural adjustment policies and which saw many mineworkers lose their jobs, women played a crucial role in ensuring the survival of their families. A rise in copper prices from 2004 saw an economic boom on the Copperbelt and a boost in income to Copperbelt residents. In this paper I describe how Copperbelt women attempted to take advantage of this boom, and how they navigate business and social life in a region where the mining industry the main revenue generator is still dominated by men. (Show less)

The paper examines the influence of family and gender in the organization of labour and the labour relationships in the Greek mines, 19th-20th centuries. As elsewhere in Europe, the organisation of work in Greek mines was based chiefly on the sub-contracting system. Since mining enterprises were of small size and they didn’t work regularly but they depended strongly on the demands of foreign markets, the employers didn’t invest in new technologies. On the contrary, they based on sub-contracting systems and gender division of labour in order to reduce the cost of labour and the total cost of production. This organisation of labour by the sub-contractor system in the Greek mines seems to a large extent to have been based on systems of kinship and on the family and gender division of labour.
To what degree did the wage which was paid to the members of the sub-contracting team constitute a part of the family wage? How and to what degree did the contractor, in sharing out duties at work in the contracting group, shape the gender division of labour in the extraction process and influence daily output? These are some of the questions that the paper will try to answer. The sources that are used are various: the Greek Miners’ Fund, Business Archives of the mining enterprises, the consular reports on mining industry, the local press. (Show less)