people, these new areas also lacked recreational and health services. By the 1960s state (central and local) efforts to limit and regulate access to physical space and close down political space were becoming successful, mostly through racially and ethnically defined group areas. But these group relocations didn‘t go without opposition and resistance. Resistance in the 1950s was in overt political action (e.g. the 1952 Defiance Campaign) as well as work-place action and mobilisation by SACTU. There were also community-based struggles, mostly in opposition to Apartheid spatial restructuring, removals and relocation42.
Forms of resistance in the 1950s and 1960s by workers, communities and women were to be silenced until the 1973 famous Durban strikes which pioneered new worker militancy in the 1970s and 1980s leading to the political activism of the 1980s and 1990s leading ultimately to freedom. These movements and activism in the 1980s were also characterized by appropriation of living space by Africans as they grew to more than 3.5 million by 1988, half of which were said to be living in shack settlements outlying the greater Durban. Most of these shack settlement dwellers were employed, but lived without health or electricity services around Inanda and Kwa-Mashu.
The labour process approach theorised the rise in militancy by African workers as a response to racial work processes under which they worked.43 In South Africa, the labour process approach draws from Braverman‘s (1974) seminal work on managerial control under monopoly capitalism as well as Burawoy‘s (1979, 1985) work on the politics of production and factory regimes in everyday life.
Internationally, the labour process approach grew also as a debate with Braverman. In American labour studies it was Burawoy (1979, 1985) and Baran (1966) who engaged Braverman‘s labour process approach. Burawoy‘s (1979, 1985) ‗Politics of Production‘ and ‗Manufacturing Consent‘ became the most influential theoretical contribution to researching process, control and resistance in the workplace44. In Britain the labour process approach was developed in the works of Hyman (1979, 1989a, 1989b) and Brown (1992), who saw the approach as a way to deal with what they called the fragmentation in British industrial sociology. They saw the labour process approach connecting different dimensions of work, employment and industrial relations under a theoretical narrative of looking at degradation of work under new forms of capitalist production and management.
In South Africa, the labour process approach re-invigorated what Webster (1995) calls New Labour Studies, which sought to break away from two dominant streams of industrial sociology, viz. in neo-classical approach, which saw sociology as a service to industry and much of its syllabus dictated and influenced by managerial concerns. In the early 1970s the neo-classical approach was challenged by what Webster calls the new class paradigm approach, a growing analysis initiated by intellectuals from exile who advanced a powerful moral critique of complicity of capital to apartheid and its treatment of African workers.
Webster asserts that both these approaches did not see the agency of African workers either in their contribution to the economy, or in their ability to advance struggles against exploitation and oppression. Webster recognises the work of Rick Turner (1972) as the first sociological analysis that took African workers seriously both in their contribution to the economy as well as their potency in
43 (Baskin, 1991; Maree, 1987; Webster, 1985a; Southall, 1985).
44 The thesis engages Burawoy‘s (1979, 1985) factory regimes in theorizing workplace order and struggles at Dunlop in everyday life.
waging working class struggles. Much of the labour process approach grew both in engagement with Turner (1972) and in response to the rupture of 1973 strikes and subsequent rise in African militant trade unions, which was termed the
‗Durban Moment‘. The works of Baskin (1991), Maree (1987), Southall (1985) and Webster (1985a, 1985b) show how industry in South Africa had (for most of the 20th century) created a large pull of a homogeneous semi-skilled African workforce, which was technologically linked within the labour process, which means, if one process area shuts down, the whole production process was shut down and stalled.
In South Africa, the labour process approach incorporated an analysis of apartheid capitalism and a racially demarcated labour process, what Gelb (1991) called racial Fordism. Webster (1985) expanded Burawoy‘s colonial despotic regimes to coin a notion of ‗racial despotism‘ and what Von Holdt (2000, 2003) calls
‗apartheid workplace regimes45‘ to depict a labour process along the apartheid racial regime, which could no longer produce a docile workforce, but was increasingly tenuous with the growth of militant trade unions. Webster (1985a, 1986) analyses the transition in the workplace (shop floor) through a concept he called ‗frontier of control‘. In this Webster explores the pushing and stretching of boundaries by both workers and management in the workplace and beyond.
Webster identifies a crisis of control in the racially despotic systems of management, which can be attributed to the transition to monopoly capitalism in the 1960s as well as resulting in the embryonic growth of trade unions. The despotic system also confronted a twofold crisis of control – resistance from the shop floor (factory), and the popular struggles in the townships which widened the crisis (1985a:190). He shows that in the 1980s there was a new frontier of control being established in which management had to come to accept the end of their
45 Webster and Von Holdt (2005) follow the road frame of labour process approach to research workplaces in post-apartheid South Africa. They assert that apartheid workplace order has been replaced with what they call ‗beyond apartheid workplace‘ because of the transition with triple dimensions, viz. political, economic and social. Webster and Von Holdt (2005) are not deterministic in their assertion of post-apartheid workplace regimes, in fact they show a complexity in workplace restructuring practices of industries and firms others following negotiated settlements with trade unions, others embracing managerial reconstruction, others with typical managerial authoritarianism and others with failed or no strategy.
unilateral prerogatives and a break in arbitrary power of supervisors (and indunas).
Von Holdt (2000, 2003) moves from Webster‘s notion of racial despotism to what he calls ‗apartheid workplace regimes‘. Von Holdt sees the workplace regime as a social structure similar to an earlier assertion by Moodie (1994). This does not mean workplace regimes are static, but he sees them as sites of struggle, always in contestation and subject to reinterpretation. In the case of South Africa the workplace as a social structure was inextricably linked to a wider social structure of South African society. Von Holdt (2003) asserts that even the Wiehahn reforms of 1980 did not deracialise the workplace as Webster (1985a: 193) suggests, they only deracialised access to the industrial relations system. While the reforms had a profound effect on the racially despotic structure of control in the workplace, workplace relations continued to be structured by racial inequality, e.g. pay, benefits, skills and power all continued to be racially defined. The racial social structure of workplace regimes was in a profound crisis because it produced an actor that no longer sought to reform it, but to destroy it. The reforms that were supposed to produce a new social structure of control in the workplace only produced an unstable one. Labour sociology at Wits University grew to be at the forefront of the labour process approach in research and teaching both during apartheid and post-apartheid.
Alongside the labour process approach was a new way of theorising rupture in the development of militant and active black trade unions (Bonnin, 1987; Hemson, 1979, 1996; Sitas, 1984b, 1986, 1989, 1996a, 1997). The new way of theorising emanated from events that have come to be known as the ‗Durban Moment‘ in South African labour studies, referring to the 1973 strikes, Dunlop strikes as well as the Culture and Working Life Programme coordinated between MAWU (later NUMSA) and TURP at the University of Natal. The cultural (social) formations approach, sought to move beyond what they saw as limitations of the labour process approach in explaining the rupture of shop floor militancy across the country and across industries and sectors of the economy. This approach looks at
the role of culture and cultural practices of African workers in the construction of a collective militant identity and struggle on the shop floor46.
The work of Sitas (1989, 1997 and 2002) and Bonnin (1987) through the Culture and Working Life Project (CWLP) became a blazing light in understanding how African workers mobilise for both shop floor and outside shop floor struggles through cultural activities. Sitas (1996) shows that cultural formations subsist from a combination of factors ranging from regional basis, e.g. ethnicity in the case of hostel dwellers in the Rand.
Cultural formations that cut across ethnicity deflect pressure and regulate behaviour within defined social spaces. They deflect what he calls processes of alienation, disvaluation, disoralia and degendering (1996:237). Sitas (2004) shows linkages of how workers used songs, poetry, dance through what he terms as daydreams and revelries to deflect alienation and devaluation of monotonous factory production. From his research in the East Rand, and in Durban Sitas (1984, 1990, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c) provides clear accounts of the role of cultural movements in worker and community struggles, like the Culture and Working Life Project (CWLP), Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) and other cultural expressions, which, through plays and performances, became a significant expression of the worker movement and political struggles in South Africa. These plays and performances grew in significance in the 1980s because they signalled what Sitas (1996b: 86) calls a new authorship and workshop techniques around themes and improvisation. They also brought to the fore oral forms of communication and performance genres that sought to bring voices to all varieties of ordinary people, squatters, workers women, youth and peasants. Sitas (1992) also looks at cultural formations in the making of comrade identity in Natal. He asserts that comradeship did not grow out of a breakdown of norms, but out of an attempt to generate new types of mobilisation and new kinds of defensive
46 The cultural (social) formations approach became dominant especially in Durban industrial sociology, culminating in increased research and theorising: linking struggles in the workplace, the city, the countryside; and looking at how attempts of control in the workplace, city life and social reproduction was resisted and the role of cultural activities, viz. music, dance, sport and leisure became avenues of mobilisation and struggle for the African working class. For more on this look at Sitas (1989, 1996, 1997, 2002), Bonnin (1986, 1999), Maylam and Edwards (1996), Hemson (1979, 1996), Lambert (1985).
organisations. Again, the making of comrade identities was facilitated by invoking of cultural formations, constructions of common identity that sought to bridge the gap between old and young, localism and ethnicity.
Much has come out of this approach, particularly in understanding and researching African workers and their struggles. Much of the cultural formations approach tends to look at the articulation of migrant identity, masculinity and social mobilisation of working class struggles on the shop floor (Sitas, 1986, 1997; Bonnin, 1987, 1999). Moodie (1994) looks at the identity of migrant workers and how constructions of masculinity transformed over the 20th century continuum amongst Xhosa, Sotho and Tswana mine workers. Bonnin (1987, 1999) looked at how the articulation of work process, consciousness and community life shaped work struggles and community struggles of workers at BTR Sarmcol. In her recent work, Bonnin (2002, 2007) looks at how identity constructions of masculinity played out during what she calls the ‗rupture‘ of political violence in Mpumalanga Township in the late 1980s and early 1990s.