Administrative politics and the coloured labour preference policy during the 1960s

One of the distinguishing regional features of recent Western Cape society and politics has been the coloured labour preference policy. The policy emerged formally in the mid-1950s as a'component of the National Party government's apartheid programme. This chapter examines the administrative politics of the policy during the 1960s, although a brief discussion of its emergence is undertaken. The 1960s was the most crucial decade during the thirty-year period that the policy regulated influx control and the labour market for Africans and coloureds in the region. The chapter argues that it was during this period that the policy began to flounder, leading to later pressures for its abandonment. It relies almost exclusively on material contained in the minutes of the Western Cape Committee for Local Bantu Administration, an organisation which represented municipal and divisional councillors and officials involved in the implementation of the policy.