No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of CONFLICT in the stratificationary process of the African in the Copper Mining Industry of Northern Rhodesia between the years 1943 - 1961. The hypothesis and assumptions which it is desired to prove can be classified as falling into four categories: 1. that which accepts human beings as individuals acting in group structures, each group having its appropriate goals and ends forming discernable patterned action systems; 2. that these groups can be reconstructed to show variable patterns of action which might be either accommodative or initially contradictory as conflicts emerge within the system; 3. that items 1 and 2 above can be objectivised by empirical materials and that they change in time, and, in so doing, are modified in structure-functional relations; 4. that conflict is the process which animates the patterns and prescribes new goals and ends within the patterned activity systems. An indefinite number of causality factors are possible in explaining social change, but we confine ourselves to the concept CONFLICT, with special reference to the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia. The economic factors operating, together with the political and social factors, producing a typical stratification of the African in the industry, sofar as this reveals changing patterns of progressive and aggressive goal thrusts and redefinition of the social positions of the contesting participants, are dealt with in the appropriate sections of this investigation. The model has been developed in relation to the study of the total social system with special emphasis on their overtly political and economical aspects. Part 1, in its entirety, deals with the theory of conflict. It also contains our own development of the theme. The empirical data are contained in parts 2, 3, with a section on envisaged future social developments. The conclusion, to this investigation, forms the last part , with an exhaustive testing of the TEN-POINT HYPOTHESIS given at the end of Part 1.

It has been alleged that the major producers of refined copper in the United States have sufficient market power to enable them to"administer" their own prices. From the early 1960s until about mid-1978, the differences between producer prices and those determined in the auction markets have often been significant, but since then producer prices have followed auction prices closely. The thesis adopts another view of producer pricing behavior; instead, it hypothesizes that the producers behave as"price takers" and trade copper at or near auction prices, either by design or because they do not have sufficient market power to do otherwise, and that they did this also in times when producer prices were significantly different from auction prices prior to mid-1978. To test this hypothesis, an econometric disequilibrium model, based on the"short-side" methods of estimating supply and demand schedules, is formulated to explain producer behavior for the subperiod from July 1978 to December 1981 assuming that the producers traded refined copper at auction prices. The model is then applied to the subperiod from January 1975 to June 1978 assuming that the producers traded refined copper at auction prices during this subperiod also. The coefficients of the equations in the model are then tested for equivalence between the two subperiods by means of the Chow test and a dummy variable technique in order to provide evidence in support of the hypothesis. Different behavior for the two subperiods is discovered, however, implying that producers may have been acting in response to administered prices instead of auction prices during the first subperiod. / Master of Arts

Copper econometric models currently existing in the open literature incorporate the demand side of the market only as an aggregated demand function. In this thesis, copper demand was disaggregated into its end-use industrial sectors and linear demand equations estimated for each sector. The correlation among the error terms of the various sectoral equations was explicitly taken into account in the estimation. Elasticities were computed at the means for the price and activity variables. A comparison with results using the Ordinary Least Squares method is also provided. Exogenous variables used in each sectoral equation were forecast separately and copper demand was subsequently forecast for each end-use sector. / Master of Arts

The competitive outlook for the U.S. copper industry was seriously questioned in the mid-1980's in light of differential wages, reserve bases, environmental enforcement, and comparable rates of technical dissemination among country producers. These concerns coincided with the displacement of U.S. output by Chilean expansion and ascendancy of the latter to the number one ranking of world producers. Explanations for U.S. competitive decline ranged from the availability of international agency credit lines for competing state-run copper producers to labor-management relations in the U.S. This dissertation examines the timing of Chilean emergence and U.S. response in relation to flexible exchange rates and monetary policy regimes of the 1980's. Previous analyses of world and North American market structure and change focused on market imperfections on the supply side or supply and stock influences in major demand centers. Earlier speculations about Chilean expansion have proved correct, but U.S. capacity displacement appears to be limited. This dissertation examines the effectiveness of earlier models when updated to the 1980's, redefines structure to achieve better fits, and tests the new model with simulations of quantity and price. World monetary policy, debt, and developing country trade policies have changed dramatically since the late 1970's. These changes together with earlier nationalization initiatives have injected significant new questions of commodity price translation and traded versus nontraded goods substitution into analyses of market behavior. The analysis developed and described in this research shows that real exchange rates of specified copper-producing countries are a significant factor in output expansion and market share gains under conditions of stable labor agreements and monetary policy. These components serve to explain how producer share gains such as for Chile were achieved during cyclical low price periods and historically high refined consumer stock conditions. Additional explanatory power is given for U.S. import and export activity in refined copper. Qualifications are given for selected producing countries that are experiencing continued output decline in the wake of Chilean-U.S. competition. The simulation results show an improvement in forecasting ability over previous models for selected country mine production, including Chile, and import-export activity for the U.S. Comparable high quality results are generated for copper price using standard model configuration. Significant errors remain, as in the overestimation of U.S. mine production recovery due to the lack of better measures of production and investment cycles in the primary copper industry. Downsizing of new or rebuilt U.S. capacity through technical shift is also not captured.

No description available.

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities of the University of the Witwatersrand Department of Sociology/ Global Labour University, in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of MA Labour and Development, Labour Policy &Globalization, 2015 / This study investigates the environmental costs of copper mining in a mining Township of Kankoyo in Mufulira, Zambia. It investigates the ways in which the mine workers in this community experience, assess and respond to the pervasive environmental degradation caused by mining operations. The study indicates that the people of Kankoyo have an implied understanding (physical experiences e.g. smoke, dust etc.) of the risks in their environment but lack explicit knowledge (long term effects). Second, the working class are now in an awkward position between participating in activism against the company that pollutes their environment and the need to keep their jobs. Third, experiences with a polluted environment have divided the Kankoyo between those who engage in community mobilisation (the unemployed) and those who don’t because they want to protect their jobs (the mine workers). As experiences take a gender dimension, women tend to suffer more due to the gender roles they play. Fourth, given their helplessness, the people of Kankoyo now plead for social services not in social justice terms but as a compensation for the pollution suffered. The core conclusion is that workers understand environmental threats but: (a) they have little awareness of the long-term effects and (b) they tend to minimise them. For these workers their economic security i.e. employment, is primary and they prioritise the immediate over the longer term, thus (c) they have not responded to this issue in an organised way, rather their unions tend to focus on traditional workplace/pay issues. In addition, state and environmental organisations’ responses are inadequate. Consequently, the community is forced to accept the negative environmental impacts on their lives and the environment. Therefore, the study makes the following arguments: (a) Mineral resource led development in Zambia has failed. Instead, it has led to devastating environmental and health impacts on the nearby communities; (b) that the provision of social services and housing to the mine workers, and revenue to the government only served to divert attention from the long term and ongoing environmental degradation that has taken place overtime. The slug dams, the accumulated dust heaps, leach plants and long term environmental degradation on the copperbelt attest to this; (c) that the corporate policy on housing only served the interests of the mining companies by stabilising the workforce without regard for the arising health impacts; and; (d) privatisation has increased the vulnerability of the working class to environmental costs of mining. In the end, from the shattered hopes of a good life ‘modernisation’ emerges in the words of one respondent a ‘development’ of ‘environmental suffering’, as Kankoyo remains a ‘bomb waiting to explode’. / XL2018

No description available.