Organized labour, regarded as an important player in many nationalist struggles in Africa, has been widely dismissed in the postcolonial period by scholars, government bureaucrats and development specialists as apolitical, privileged and reactionary. The Zambian copper miners and their powerful union, the Mineworker's Union of Zambia (MUZ), have been a poster child for this argument. The union's demands for increased wages in the years after independence have been seen by many political scientists and development economists as proof that the mineworkers were a privileged elite, selfishly putting their own demands above the needs of state-led economic growth and social development. In the 1980s, international financial institutions and their academic and policy allies dismissed the mineworkers as consumption-oriented elites, determined to resist the ‘necessary’ liberalization of the economy. The capitulation of some MUZ leaders to the corporatist agenda of the ruling United National Independence Party (UNIP) in the 1970s only strengthened these arguments. Larmer launches a well-documented, carefully researched challenge to these assumptions.

Situating his analysis in copper's crucial role in the Zambian economy and development planning, Larmer traces UNIP and state efforts to control mine revenue and contain mineworker demands. The creation of the government-dominated Zambian Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), and the capitulation of some key MUZ officials to this corporatist strategy, have been held up as proof of the mineworkers' apolitical position. Larmer challenges this extrapolation of worker consciousness from the attitudes and behaviour of union leaders, arguing that it obscures a consistent commitment to worker rights and democratic processes among mineworkers and many union leaders. Drawing on 62 interviews with national and local MUZ leaders and extensive archival research, Larmer concludes that the rank and file, along with many branch leaders, condemned this co-optation and quickly sought to replace these officials with more committed and independent leaders. Moreover, the mineworkers and MUZ played important and influential political roles in the drive towards multi-party democracy and the triumph of the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) in the polls in 1991, further demonstrating their political awareness, commitment and engagement at both union and national levels.

The mineworkers' demands for better wages and working conditions in the face of massive national development challenges have been regarded as proof of mineworker privilege and self-absorption. Yet Larmer's informants demonstrate the broad social and political concerns embedded in mineworker and MUZ demands, including:

While these concerns fuelled demands specific to the miners, such as better wages and working conditions, they also demonstrated a broader concern with and critique of widespread corruption, ineffective governance, the refusal to invest in the country's major resource (copper) and the terrible costs of structural adjustment policies. These concerns reflect the mineworkers' values and their grounding in both the workplace and the mine communities. Indeed, community members increasingly joined labour action, particularly the wives, and the workers sought a ‘social wage’ that could ensure family and community well-being. These demands resonated with the widespread disillusionment in the 1980s, increasing the popular support and political leverage of the unions in the struggle to dislodge UNIP and the one-party state, and to replace it with multi-party democracy.

Larmer's call for a reassessment of the labour aristocracy thesis, with its assumption of privilege and selfish, apolitical absorption among elite workers, is timely and well argued. His in-depth analysis of internal trade union politics and their focus on accountability is also well documented. However, the argument about the role of the mining communities in worker consciousness and collective action would have been strengthened by more attention to the particular character of mine communities and more research on ordinary women in those communities. Larmer has interviewed a few women union leaders, but the voices of housewives in the mine townships are notably absent. Yet these very women marched in strikes and shaped worker demands. More use of existing literature on gender in the mine townships, as well as female informants, would have strengthened his argument. This is not an easy task. Indeed, the absence of Copperbelt women's voices in other key texts, such as Ferguson's excellent Expectations of Modernity (1999), suggests that a gendered analysis of the Copperbelt will not be an easy task.

Moreover, the book acknowledges the impact of Chinese and Indian ownership on the Copperbelt, but draws deeply pessimistic conclusions about the future. Larmer argues that the MUZ has been hamstrung by its political involvement with the MMD – even suggesting that the way of life he has described may soon disappear. Yet, at another point, Larmer points to the key role of the mineworkers and the MUZ in the opening-up of democratic space for challenges by civil society. It seems to me that this resilience and the refusal of mineworkers and the MUZ to accept the ‘party line’, despite intense pressures, suggests the possibility of a more hopeful future, one ‘built upon the legacy of the mineworkers’ considerable contribution to post-colonial political change' (p. 200).