The Formation of a Modern Mining Enterprise

Capital, Labor Migration, and Early Forms of Worker Resistance

In 1920, at the age of forty-eight, Carmen Aceituno began work in the El Teniente copper mine as a day laborer. The mining company was experiencing an explosive period of growth as a result of expanding international markets for copper and had sent agents (enganchadores) into the countryside to recruit workers with promises of high wages and pay advances. Aceituno came to the mine from the nearby agricultural town of Coinco and labored in El Teniente off and on for the next eighteen years. After working a short stint in 1920, he left El Teniente, only returning in 1923 to work for seven months. Aceituno went back to work in the mine in 1924, 1925, 1926, and 1928 for short stretches and then worked four straight years between 1934 and 1938. His work in the mine was punctuated by periodic absences and dismissals. Aceituno was fired on three occasions during his intermittent career for absenteeism, lack of productivity, and drunkenness.

Aceituno's experience of work in the mine is characteristic of El Teniente's early labor force. Most workers who migrated to the mine had participated in a transient labor force that traveled the Chilean countryside working on rural estates according to seasonal demand for labor, in the many small, labor-intensive copper mines that dotted Chile's Andean mountain range, in ports and cities, and in the nitrate mines of the northern Atacama Desert since the middle of the nineteenth century. These workers resisted pressures to settle in El Teniente and frequently abandoned their jobs in search of better opportunities elsewhere. Miners also refused to accommodate to the company's demands for work discipline. Drinking on the job, low productivity, and absenteeism posed an endemic problem for company supervisors.

The development of the El Teniente mine represented a shift in the Chilean mining industry from the small, undercapitalized, rudimentary, domestically owned mines of the nineteenth century to large, capital-intensive, vertically integrated, foreign-owned industrial enterprises employing sophisticated technology for the extraction, smelting, and processing of copper ore. By the end of the First World War, El Teniente employed over five thousand workers, and its demand for trained labor grew as it expanded production during the 1920s. The itinerant mining labor force of workers like Aceituno presented a major obstacle to the company's growth. Throughout the 1920s, the company found its efforts to increase production hampered by a population of workers that displayed little conformity to the new rhythms of work and discipline in the modern mining enterprise. These male workers were joined by an equally transient group of single women workers who migrated to the mine's camps, informal settlements on El Teniente's outskirts, and the nearby city of Rancagua in search of work as domestic servants and in petty commerce. Women participated with men in a turbulent popular culture of drinking and fluid romantic and sexual relationships that undermined the North American copper company's efforts to discipline and settle its labor force.

Constructing a Foreign Enclave: The El Teniente Mine and the Braden Copper Company

Beginning in 1873, Chile confronted a series of economic crises. The expansive growth of the previous four decades based on the export of mineral and agricultural primary commodities to world markets had begun to slow. In the mining sector, Chilean producers had exhausted the high-grade copper ore in their small, labor-intensive mines. At the same time, large bodies of copper ore were found in the United States, and by the 1880s North American mines began to supply a large portion of the world's copper, eliminating markets for Chilean exports. Whereas in 1876 Chile produced 62 percent of the total world copper supply, by 1900 its share of international copper production had dropped to 5 percent. The agricultural export economy encountered a similar decline as demand for Chilean wheat diminished as a result of the loss of markets in the United States and Australia and the limits to production on large estates. Further expansion in both the agricultural and mining sectors required reform of antiquated systems of labor relations and investment in new methods of production.

Chilean mining entrepreneurs, however, failed to develop high levels of productive capital in the mining sector or to invest in the modernization of mining and processing techniques. Nineteenth-century copper mines were small enterprises, often discovered and developed by independent prospectors who lacked capital, struggled with chronic debt, and depended on financing from merchants to run their operations and market their ore. Mine owners and producers continued, as during the colonial period, to be subordinated financially to large —and often foreign-owned— commercial houses. Chilean mine owners turned to cheap labor and subcontracting to independent miners rather than mechanization to increase production. Throughout the nineteenth century various foreign writers commented favorably on the ways in which Chilean mine owners combined colonial methods of production with cheap labor. One British writer noted, for example, that mining in Chile was a bad business that was made viable only through the use of "the least expensive labor force imaginable." Similarly, Charles Darwin wrote that "it is now well known that the Chilean method of mining is the cheapest." Most foreign critics were quick to observe that the only profitable mining business lay in financing and commerce, rather than production.

Confronted with continuing cycles of debt to commercial houses, mining producers intensified their exploitation of mine workers (peones and apires). Labor in the copper mines of the nineteenth century was harshly disciplined, intense, and brutal. Mine workers who stole rocks of ore were legally beaten by mine owners and police, mining camps were rigidly controlled by armed guards, and miners were forced to carry identification cards. Work...