Organized labor in the republic of South Africa: History and democratic transition

Abstract

In some respects, the history of the South African labor movement has a complexity and longevity that makes it quite unique on the African continent. The key feature here is, of course, the relative historic length and depth of industrialization as an economic process in South Africa. However, it also contains features that are essential to understanding the way labor movements have developed elsewhere in Africa and that enable comparisons to be usefully made. There are also obvious areas of comparison between the labor movement in South Africa and those in colonial contexts where settlers from the colonizing country and elsewhere have formed leading sectors in the working class. The particularities of South African political development-notably the form that its colonization took-has meant that the labor force has been deeply divided. The politics of trade unionism and the consciousness of workers have always been linked closely to struggles over the class and ethnic form post-colonial power would take. Thus, the goal of an all-inclusive movement representing labor has been very elusive. South Africa is a virtual laboratory for the study of the relationship between fragmented sections of the working class, divided by race, ethnicity, and gender. Labor historian Jon Lewis has shown in detail how these historic divisions always need to be understood in terms of the typical trade union issues of skill and craft, faced with the protean nature of industrial capitalism, in order to explain the organizational and structural history of South African labor (1984). Eddie Webster brings to bear additionally the complicated question of control over workplace conditions, drawing upon the influential study of Harry Braverman to explain the history of class consciousness and organization in the South African industrial arena (Webster 1985).