Contesting the New Politics of Space: Labour and Capital in the White Goods Industry in Southern Africa

This chapter explores the southern African household appliance manufacturing industry in order to understand how space and scale configure struggles over the geography of production. In contrast to structuralist conceptualisations of the way capital produces economic landscapes, this chapter explores how labour, too, draws on its sources of power to challenge boundaries, capital’s spatial fixes and scales of organisation. This moves us from accounts of how the geography of capitalism is made which see labour incorporated into explanations largely in terms of how capital chooses between different groups of workers when creating particular economic geographies (an approach referred to as providing accounts which are merely ‘geographies of labour’) to those wherein labour is seen as an active agent in the politics of space (an approach termed ‘labour geography’). In arguing for an approach which views workers as active spatial agents, it is important, however, to remember that accounts of agency which do not recognise the realities of power degenerate into a naïve voluntarism. Certainly, in the case of the apartheid South African state, which engaged in extra-judicial killings and the legal capital punishment of opponents, ‘bannings’, proscription of trade unions, and a host of other practices, the power of the state to engage around the highly visible categories of ‘race’ and gender in deliberative spatial engineering – such as creating various ‘black homelands’ to serve as labour reserves that would be disarticulated from ‘white South Africa’ – to reconfigure the capital-labour relationship cannot be underestimated. Nevertheless, as we show, despite this labour has actively engaged in the politics of producing space and geographical scale to challenge the boundaries drawn and the landscapes envisioned by the apartheid state and employers. Central to labour’s power were strong shop stewards committees in factories, committees that were able to build linkages from the local to the national level and, from there, were able to draw on international solidarity to support their struggles. In effect, such committees and the workers they represented were able to ‘jump’ spatial scales of organisation, to expand their struggles and lines of support from the very local to the truly global.

Publication details: Bezuidenhout, Andries & Webster, Edward. 2010. “Contesting the New Politics of Space: Labour and Capital in the White Goods Industry in Southern Africa.” In: Susan McGrath-Champ, Andrew Herod & Al Rainnie (eds.). Handbook Of Employment And Society: Working Space. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.