From Compounded to Fragmented Labour: Mineworkers and the Demise of Compounds in South Africa

At the core of colonial and apartheid social engineering was a spatial strategy based on institutions and infrastructure linking together rural homesteads and villages, and mining centres and towns. In the case of the mining industry, single-sex compounds were set up as the foundation of the infrastructure of control over black labour. In this paper we examine how various forms of control operated. The paper’s contribution is located within the labour geography literature. It argues that it was not only state institutions and major corporations that shaped landscapes of control. In this regard the paper highlights the centrality of workers' agency, specifically the way in which the National Union of Mineworkers captured the compounds and subverted the logic of employer control. However, the union's successes as well as the advent of democracy have resulted in profound changes, thus presenting the union with new challenges.

Reference: Bezuidenhout, A & Buhlungu, S. 2010. "From Compounded to Fragmented Labour: Mineworkers and the Demise of Compounds in South Africa", Antipode, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 237-263 - download here.