Publications

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.

What can trade unions do to enhance their influence within successful liberation movements while simultaneously protecting their autonomy? The chapter reviews COSATU’s relationship to the ANC and asks the question: How successful has the South African labour movement been in enhancing its autonomy when it has been, and still is, closely allied to the ANC and the SACP? Furthermore, are there alternative ways of influencing post-apartheid policy emerging?

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.

This paper argues that African working class households are the sites of a crisis of social reproduction in contemporary South Africa. Through a gendered analysis of five townships in Emnambithi the paper demonstrates that African working class women are the shock absorbers of this crisis.  While feminist scholars point to a growing crisis of social reproduction as a global phenomenon, the South African material illustrates how this is experienced in the South by poor women.

An analysis of the privatised steel monopoly ArcelorMittal’s operations in South Africa is used to raise questions about the power of multinational corporations in relation to the state. The article focuses on the steel manufacturer’s externalization of environmental, social and economic costs onto communities and upstream consumers of steel.

This paper draws on the results of a third leg of a longitudinal survey of COSATU members run in 2004 by the Sociology of Work Unit (SWOP) and the Democracy and Governance unit of the Human Science Research Council in South Africa and compares these with results of the first two legs of the survey (1994 and 1998). The study shows a remarkable continuity of the militant union traditions within the union federation.

From 1973 to 2000, the emerging black union movement in South Africa made efforts to construct a collectivist and democratic organizational culture. The development and decline of this culture correspond with three phases in the history of the black trade union movement. Political and economic changes in the past fifteen years have affected this culture, specifically the unions' political engagement and new pressures arising out of globalization.

The advent of democracy in South Africa has brought a number of benefits and opened spaces for union mobilization. It has also set in motion processes that undermine union solidarity. This article takes the most influential trade union in South Africa's history, the National Union of Mineworkers, as a case study to explore this paradox.

*Winner of the 2009 Distinguished Scholarly Monograph Prize, awarded by the American Sociological Association Labour and Labour Movements section*

This report on the linkages between the formal and the informal economy was commissioned by the Department of Labour. The brief from the Department of Labour was to determine whether the data on the informal economy correctly captures the level of informal employment; to examine the linkages between formal and formal employment; and to develop a framework for reducing the decent work deficits in informal employment.