“You'll Be Fired if You Refuse” - Human Rights Watch

them as having spoken to Human Rights Watch. Details, including age, experience, and
specifics of an accident have been withheld where they could expose the identity of
individuals interviewed.
Among the management representatives from the Chinese-run mines, Human Rights
Watch spoke principally with Zambian nationals. When they were asked if meetings
could be arranged with Chinese high-level management, they all responded that it
would not be possible—that meetings with groups like Human Rights Watch were
conducted only by Zambian nationals. Human Rights Watch made further attempts, in
Chinese, to interview Chinese managers and lower-level workers from the Chinese-run
copper mines. However, Human Rights Watch was denied access to the work sites and
to compounds where the Chinese workforce spends non-working hours. The Chinese
workers generally spend their time outside of work in Chinese-only walled compounds.
In the few cases in which direct contact was made with a Chinese national involved in
the copper mining industry, Human Rights Watch was generally refused interviews.
During one brief interview with a Chinese corporate public relations officer from Sino
Metals, for example, the officer went inside the compound and returned to say that her
boss told her that she should not be speaking with our researcher.
Human Rights Watch also sent a letter with this report’s principal findings to NFCA and
China Non-Ferrous Metals Mining Corporation (CNMC). The letter to CNMC and CNMC’s
detailed response translated from Chinese are in Annex I. Additional letters with relevant
findings were sent to Konkola Copper Mines, Mopani Copper Mines, and Kansanshi Mining.
Mopani was the only company to reply, and its responses have been included in the report.
In interviews published throughout this report, Zambian miners refer to “the Chinese” in
their discussions of workplace conditions at the four copper mining companies owned by
CNMC. By printing this language, Human Rights Watch does not imply that all Chinese
companies in Zambia or in Africa are involved in abusive labor practices—or that all
Chinese managers in Zambia’s copper industry are abusive. There are important
differences among the four Chinese-owned copper mining companies and among each
company’s individual managers, some of whom maintain good working relations with their
Zambian employees. However, the reference to “the Chinese” as if a monolithic entity is
common in Zambian discourse and, in representing what interviewees told Human Rights
Watch, is important to reflect in this report.
While this report often provides both the relevant international and Zambian law for the
labor abuses documented, Human Rights Watch was not able to obtain Zambia’s specific
11 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | NOVEMBER 2011