Abstract
AbstractThis article analyses how, through adopting responsibility for their co‐workers’ livelihoods, workplace‐based unionists shaped Zambian mining capitalism. I argue that union branch executives learnt that they could best assist their co‐workers through offering them financial services and through co‐operation with company HR. During wage negotiations, unionists drew strength from this understanding, encouraging them to see ever‐decreasing salaries as market‐driven, and discouraging the militancy that has on occasion raised wages. Building upon the anthropology of trade unionism, I detail how tangible solidarities within a workplace shape unions’ ethical‐political projects; and argue that subjectivation through union ideologies can discourage scrutiny of structural injustice. Linking anthropology that explores capitalism through relationships and moral norms to liberalized capital's disempowerment of unions, I claim that unionists’ moral, technical, and physical labour mitigated, yet inadvertently enabled, worsening working conditions.
Highlights
This article analyses how, through adopting responsibility for their co-workers’ livelihoods, workplace-based unionists shaped Zambian mining capitalism
Joseph believed that a strike or goslow may have raised wages; he would have felt responsible for any workers fired after industrial action and he feared that overly generous salaries could cause Mopani Copper Mines (MCM) to close
In exploring how Lloyd, an Mineworkers Union of Zambia (MUZ) branch chairman, experienced two years of negotiations at a Chinese Non-Ferrous Metals Corporation Limited (CNMCL) subsidiary, I argue that tangible solidarities and union ideologies taught unionists that negotiations were successful if they did not end in militancy, even if they achieved poor wage increments
Summary
This article analyses how, through adopting responsibility for their co-workers’ livelihoods, workplace-based unionists shaped Zambian mining capitalism. When they agreed upon a 7 per cent pay raise (their third below-inflation increment in five years), he messaged me to articulate how proud he was of both the unionists and management Kanda knew that his co-workers’ lives were becoming harder and he planned to provide miners with financial training and expand their access to union-affiliated bank loans. Union resources and ideologies enabled Kanda to mitigate decreasing wages’ effects on his coworkers’ lives, yet encouraged him to justify inadequate salaries to them Through their relationships in the workplace and the union, and through the personhoods unionism helped them to create, union branch executives like Joseph and Kanda performed the emotional and technical labour of sustaining Zambian capitalism.
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