ABSTRACT

Historians of South Africa recognise the 1970s as an important turning point. In the face of intensifying African demands for rights and political freedoms amidst a deepening economic crisis, the apartheid state instituted labour reforms which for the first time granted industrial citizenship to African workers. Existing scholarship regard this as a crucial shift in the white regime’s rhetoric and strategies of dominance, inaugurating a new politics of inclusion and exclusion which sought to divide black resistance by co-opting sections of the African population into the system. In this way, white dominance would be safeguarded and the conditions for capital accumulation restored. But absent from such considerations are the interests and experiences of the country’s white industrial workforce. Historically, white workers’ identity and material position was deeply dependent on the convergence of race and rights. Labour reform therefore posed a fundamental threat to white working-class power, privilege and subjectivities. This chapter examines how these workers responded to the possibility of reform as the unmaking of racial privilege in the labour arena. This offers new insights as to the class conflicts within white society in the late apartheid era, and into the entanglement of race, labour and citizenship in South Africa.