A reasonable negotiation? Workplace‐based unionists' subjectivities, wage negotiations, and the day‐to‐day life of an ethical‐political project

Thomas McNamara
2021 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute  
This 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
more » ... hat 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. In December 2017, Joseph, Richard, 1 and I were examining financial records stolen from Mopani Copper Mines (MCM), a Zambian Glencore subsidiary. Joseph and Richard were employed by MCM as miners and volunteered as union branch executives. Mopani renegotiated wages with the unions annually, and Joseph hoped to use these records to demonstrate that MCM could afford a significant pay rise. Fearing retribution against the miner who had stolen the records, Joseph would only use them to triangulate data obtained legally: workers counting trucks leaving the mine-site, production numbers provided by sympathetic line-managers, and Glencore's semi-annual financial reports. Seemingly strengthening the unionists' position, the global copper price had recently hit a four-year high. When the Mineworkers Union of Zambia's (MUZ) President presented Joseph's arguments to Mopani, its HR officer claimed that the mine was not profitable. MCM had supposedly been buying copper from an entrepreneur in the Congo and was counterintuitively disadvantaged by the increased copper price. That night, Richard drove across the Zambia-Congo border, searching unsuccessfully for the entrepreneur
doi:10.1111/1467-9655.13420 fatcat:tu3wxkuaana3dcepdpr3zfluq4