Shop floors and rugby fields: The social basis of auto worker solidarity in South Africa

International Labor and Working-Class History

Volumn , Issue 51, 1997, Pages 96-128

  Adler, Glenn ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND   (South Africa)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0031496889     PISSN: 01475479     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0147547900002003     Document Type: Article

References (5)

1. Throughout this article the term black refers to all people of color, who generally, as a result of their skin color, share broadly similar conditions of exclusion and dispossession under apartheid. The term colored refers to people of mixed-race origins. Indian refers to descendants of persons from the subcontinent who either emigrated to South Africa or came as indentured labor. White refers to the descendants of European colonists and immigrants. Where necessary, the term African is used to distinguish descendants of the original indigenous inhabitants of the land from coloreds and Indians. These terms are admittedly imprecise and contested, and the reality to which they refer is itself indeterminate. Yet to write about relations between colored and African workers assumes that the differences between them are experientially real, not just a product of a researcher's conceptual categories.
2. See Yunus Carrim, "Trade Unionism in Natal: Shopfloor Relations between Indian and African Workers," South African Labour Bulletin 11 (1986):44-64. For a discussion of the problems encountered organizing colored workers see Hilary Joffe, "Stayaways in Cape Town, 1986," paper presented at the Association for Sociology in Southern Africa conference, University of Natal, Durban, July 1986. Many of the problems associated with organizing across racial lines have been overcome through national-level mergers, such as between two large unions of African and colored clothing and textile workers, and through the development of new organizing strategies.
3. See Yunus Carrim, "Trade Unionism in Natal: Shopfloor Relations between Indian and African Workers," South African Labour Bulletin 11 (1986):44-64. For a discussion of the problems encountered organizing colored workers see Hilary Joffe, "Stayaways in Cape Town, 1986," paper presented at the Association for Sociology in Southern Africa conference, University of Natal, Durban, July 1986. Many of the problems associated with organizing across racial lines have been overcome through national-level mergers, such as between two large unions of African and colored clothing and textile workers, and through the development of new organizing strategies.
4. For a discussion of racial despotism, see Eddie Webster, "A New Frontier of Control? Case Studies in the Changing Form of Job Control in South African Industrial Relations," in South African Industrial Relations of the 80s, ed. Willie Bendix (Cape Town, 1988), 72-82; and Eddie Webster, Cast in A Racial Mould: Labour Process and Trade Unionism in the Foundries (Johannesburg, 1985).
5. For a discussion of racial despotism, see Eddie Webster, "A New Frontier of Control? Case Studies in the Changing Form of Job Control in South African Industrial Relations," in South African Industrial Relations of the 80s, ed. Willie Bendix (Cape Town, 1988), 72-82; and Eddie Webster, Cast in A Racial Mould: Labour Process and Trade Unionism in the Foundries (Johannesburg, 1985).