SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

“We Have Always Been Good Citizens”: The Wiehahn Commission, Industrial Reform And White Organised Labour In South Africa, 1977-1980

This paper considers the role played by white trade unions and their representatives in the Commission of Inquiry into Labour Legislation appointed in the wake of the growing labour unrest, black political agitation, economic decline and international pressure which characterised apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. The Wiehahn Commission, as it was popularly known, proposed a series of industrial reforms which included, most significantly, the granting of trade union rights to African workers and the removal of statutory job reservation. In the light of these reforms, white workers emerged from the so-called ‘Wiehahn process’ in a much weaker position: not only was the protective legislation they had benefited from for many decades removed, but within the new labour dispensation, they had to negotiate and compete with African workers on equal terms. This paper reconstructs some of the central debates, strategies and cleavages which characterised the Wiehahn Commission in an effort to understand how white workers emerged as the losers from a process in which they were intimately involved and invested. In so doing, it demonstrates the need to revise existent analyses which portray white workers as a homogenous and negligible group of conservatives, while suggesting a correlation between worker responses and industry-specific skills. It also engages with the broader historiographical debate on the Commission’s intentions and poses larger questions as to the nature of reform in the late-apartheid period, and the relationship of white labour to capital and the state.