False Economy - Alan Beattie [60]
The U.S. trade union movement, though much smaller, was similarly built around the foundations of coal, copper, and silver mining. The closest modern equivalents of the militant American miners are in Chile. Not even a quarter-century of trade union suppression under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet could eliminate the ability of the country's copper miners to scoop up a big chunk of the increased income that comes from a rise in global copper prices. Every big rise in the price brings a ritualized confrontation when the unions threaten to put down tools, and sometimes do so, in a game of chicken with the government. Neither side wants mining to come to a halt, but each knows there is a lot of revenue to be bargained over by threatening to stop it.
Even at a much more removed level, tanker drivers for oil companies in the UK have traditionally been paid much more than comparable drivers in other industries, though the degree of skill and danger involved are identical. Indeed, the cost to the country and the employer that oil tanker drivers could inflict became evident in the fuel protests of 2000. A handful of drivers nearly brought the economy to a halt by going on wildcat strike. The great baggage train of the economy was held up by a few dozen bandits at a mountain pass.
Digging and drilling also often go together with sex and drugs, and not in a good way. Mining and prostitution have long been mutually reinforcing bedfellows. Miners are usually relatively well-paid men isolated from wives and families, and hence given to concurrent sexual relationships, including some with prostitutes. In developing countries especially, this increasingly means they are vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. Areas like the Zambian copper belt are suffused with prostitution and infection. The bars are full of girls as young as twelve selling their bodies for a few dollars, generally with a dollar or two premium for not using a condom.
And the epidemic of crystal methamphetamine use in the United States has been particularly acute among oil and gas-rig workers. Crystal meth, it appears, provides a release from the boredom of being stuck out in platforms in the Gulf of Mexico for weeks on end.
Sometimes accidents of history and geography provide neat little tests of just how corrupting minerals can be. Sao Tome and Principe, a tiny two-island nation off the west coast of Africa, discovered oil in 1997-1999. A comparison of the postcolonial experiences of this little country and that of nearby Cape Verde is a perfect illustration (perhaps even neater than our earlier comparison of the United States and Argentina). Cape Verde had many similarities to Sao Tome and Principe: it had also been a Portuguese colony, had been made independent in the same year (1975), had experienced a similar first government after independence, and had also achieved its first free democratic elections sixteen years after independence, in 1991. Moreover, thanks to migration and other links between the two, they were culturally similar.
The results of the oil discovery in Sao Tome and Principe were enough to make a development economist hug herself with joy. They conformed precisely to the predictions of the resource curse. A series of surveys of the public showed that, after announcements were made about the discovery of oil, the perception of corruption in Sao Tome and Principe, as