JUST TRANSITION FROM BELOW: HOW MINEWORKERS IN ZIMBABWE LINK LABOUR RIGHTS TO CLIMATE JUSTICE

This article examines how mineworkers in Zimbabwe engage with and reshape climate justice debates amid the expansion of extractive industries and the global green transition. Drawing on qualitative research based on semi-structured interviews with mineworkers, trade union officials, and civil society actors, the study explores how experiences of labour exploitation, unsafe working conditions, and environmental degradation shape workers’ understandings of climate justice. The findings indicate that while civil society organisations and policy actors have largely shaped climate justice discourse, mineworkers are articulating claims grounded in everyday struggles and seeking to participate in shaping just transition processes. These claims centre on demands for stronger regulation of labour and environmental standards, more equitable redistribution of mineral wealth, and forms of reparative justice for communities affected by extractivism. Engagement with transnational labour networks further contributes to the emergence of a worker-centred climate justice consciousness linking workplace struggles to broader socio-ecological concerns. By foregrounding worker agency, the article advances a labour-centred perspective on climate justice in the Global South and argues that a just transition must be democratically negotiated, socially redistributive, and historically attentive.