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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 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.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

Trade unions in Zambia and in several other developing countries have been understood to create 'detribalising' class consciousnesses. In contrast, we argue that Zambian understandings of unionism have developed through similar political economic processes to those that generated 'tribes'. Values and structures that enable concepts of the good life more commonly found among Bemba speakers and Eastern Zambians have been naturalised into Zambia's mining unions, guiding union policy and practice in a manner which limits North Western Zambians' union participation. Utilising Lazar's (2018) understanding of unionism as kinship, we explore how Zambians of various tribes attempt to utilise unions to achieve what they see as human flourishing and social justice. We foreground that people's understandings of the good life frequently incorporate gendered and gerontocratic hierarchies and we demonstrate that intra-national unionisms are cocreated through (and influence) local cultural norms and political histories. This encourages anthropologists of trade unionism to ask what values and hierarchies are rendered invisible in other union 'families', and to explore intertwinements between unions and communities enabled through kinship, rather than through Civil Society Organisations.

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This special issue seeks to understand how unions resist and are reshaped as they confront global capital and neoliberal austerity. It was born out of panels at the annual conferences of European Association of Social Anthropologists and the American Anthropology Association and through ongoing conversations about the similarities and differences between the challenges unions face from austerity in the Global North and from Global South aspirations for national 'development'. The papers explore unions' interactions with 'actually existing neoliberalisms', where the state and other actors express extreme faith in markets as policy devices, and in the superior efficiency of the private sector (Rizzo 2017). We describe unions responding to the growing criticism (from the right) that they imped the economic growth that would assist all of society and (from the left) that they represent a privileged and increasingly irrelevant minority of workers. While we explore unions' attempts to dispute these narratives, our special issue is equally invested in detailing how unionism is re-constructed inside a community and, through this, how unions respond to, and co-create, legal, economic and cultural structures. In analysing how unionism shapes and responds to economic practices and workplace subjectivities, we foreground that the obligations and entitlements of being a 'unionist' and a 'worker' are negotiated through intra-community expectations and political histories. We therefore link unions to recent breakthroughs in the anthropological study of capitalism, where political economies are enacted through sociality and subjectivity (cf. Bear et al. 2015 andHann andParry 2018). Unionism is only beginning to be analysed using this framework, yet we show that unions are crucial to the concepts of self and relationships that shape and enable intra-national capitalisms (c.f. Kasmir 2014 and Lazar 2017). We explore how unions guide and respond to what it means to be a miner, steelworker or longshoreman, while simultaneously influencing what it means to be Zambian, Congolese, Greek or Dialectical Anthropology