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

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 they could best assist co-workers through offering them financial services and co-operation with company HR. During wage negotiations, unionists drew strength from this understanding, encouraging them to see ever-decreasing salaries as market-driven, discouraging the militancy has on occasion raised wages. Building upon the anthropology of trade unionism, detail how tangible solidarities within a workplace shape unions’ ethical-political projects; subjectivation union ideologies can discourage scrutiny of structural injustice. Linking anthropology explores capitalism relationships moral norms to liberalized capital's disempowerment unions, claim unionists’ moral, technical, physical labour mitigated, yet inadvertently enabled, worsening working conditions.