Production politics and the construction of consent: A case study of health and safety in mining

This thesis examines underground miners' consent and resistance to working conditions as health and safety hazards. The study focuses on miners working in underground mines operated by INCO Ltd. in Sudbury, Ontario. The objective of the thesis is to examine how the technical, political and ideological character of miners' relations in production shape the social meanings and practices comprising miners' consent or resistance to health and safety conditions. The thesis begins by identifying the specific elements of knowledge, perceptions, beliefs, and actions which form the subjective basis of miners' consent and resistance. These social meanings and practices are analyzed as four related but distinct processes: the construction of health and safety knowledge, the perception and construction of risk, the acceptance of risk, and the construction of responses to unacceptable risk. I then show that there are two aspects of miners' relations in production which are critical to understanding the dominant patterns of meaning and action and the variations within those patterns: the technical relations in production which define the labour process and, the formal and informal structures of production politics and ideologies. Within the later set of relations, I further distinguish general production politics and ideologies from specific structures of health and safety politics and ideologies.;The main arguments in the thesis are based on comparisons of miners and mines in three distinct mining labour processes--conventional nonmechanized mining, conventional mechanized mining, and bulk continuous process mining. I show that there are important differences in the amount of labour control and power over management and working conditions within the three processes and that those differences are expressed in different patterns of consent and resistance to conditions as health and safety hazards. I also show that these differences are conditioned by specific political and ideological strategies developed and implemented by management which are, in turn, shaped by a variety of influences including the actions of miners, the state, and the union, the effects of changes in the labour process, and changes in external economic conditions. Particular emphasis is placed on identifying specific management strategies which show how management achieves the reproduction of consent as the labour process undergoes continuous changes and, at the same time, explain the strengths and limits of workers' resistance in the face of those changes.