Double Precarisation of Labour and Social Reproduction: Zambian Mineworkers’ Experience of Electricity Pricing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores how increases in electricity tariffs for mining companies and domestic consumers affect the lives of Zambian mineworkers. It shows that, on the one hand, mining companies retrench workers, citing falling rates of profit, in a context in which unions are weak and workers have limited recourse, meaning loss of employment and uncertainty. On the other hand, given their low wages, the withdrawal of company social benefits, wage inflation and high indebtedness, increasing tariffs undermine mineworkers’ ability to meet their cost of living. In addition, it leads to conflicts about the efficient use of electricity at household level, increasing use of dirty fuels and vulnerability to criminality. This article argues that, for mineworkers, electricity tariff increases lead to a double precarisation – of labour and reproduction. The article draws on ethnographic field research conducted between 2015 and 2023 in two mining communities and two underground mine sites on the Zambian Copperbelt.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".