Publications

Chapter published in Roberts, S. (ed). Sustainable Manufacturing? The Case of South Africa and Ekurhuleni. Cape Town: Juta. The chapter considers the closure of the Kelvinator plant in Alrode, Johannesburg, and the implications of the industrial geography of post-apartheid South Africa for industrial policy. The book can be ordered online. 

Chapter published in Roberts, S. (ed). Sustainable Manufacturing? The Case of South Africa and Ekurhuleni. Cape Town: Juta. The chapter examines the impact of shock treatment industrial policy - the rapid reduction in import tariffs - on communities and households that depended on employment in the textiles and footwear sectors. The book can be ordered online.

This title analyses the results of a survey of the political attitudes of members of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) undertaken in the run up to South Africa's third democratic general election in 2004. The survey was the third in a series, two previous ones having been conducted by some of the authors writing in the present collection before the elections of 1994 and 1999.

This article provides a critical review of the nature and state of union organization in Mozambique, based on a survey of employees in the country's two principal urban centres, Maputo and Beira. The findings of the survey underscore the point that the ability of unions to retain a physical presence in adverse circumstances does not necessarily represent a reflection of union strength. Whilst retaining a residual presence in many workplaces, Mozambican unions have battled to cope with changes in the external labour market and a greatly altered political climate.

This article examines the changing nature of work and employment in Southern Africa in the wake of liberalization, drawing on six case studies across the manufacturing, retail, and self-employed sectors. Liberalization has intensified competition, leading to the evolution of three different “worlds of work” in which some workers benefit from global integration, some survive in employment, but under worse conditions, and others are retrenched and forced to “make a living” in informal and unpaid work.

The central research question this chapter addresses is whether there is a single, coherent environmental movement which is mobilising under the comprehensive banner of environmental justice and whether the Environmental Justice Networking Forum (EJNF) is its organisational expression. Answering this question involved site visits, focus groups, participant observation, interviews with 30 key informants selected for their expertise on environmental activism and a literature review of primary and secondary sources.

Has the apartheid workplace been superseded or entrenched over the past ten years of democracy in South Africa? In order to answer these questions, the authors of this book studied seventeen different workplaces, including BMW, a state hospital, footwear sweatshops and the wine farming industry. The editors broaden the definition of work to cover studies of the informal economy, including street traders, homeworkers and small rural enterprises.

 

Chapter published in Nichols, T. & Cam, S. (eds.). Labour in a Global World: Case Studies from the White Goods Industry in Africa, South America, East Asia and Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. This chapter considers changes in the labour regimes in the white goods industry in South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. It draws on Mahmood Mamdani's notion of a bifurcated state to illustrate how changes in labour regime are still embedded in a post-colonial industrial structure that is locked into urban and rural divides.

 

Chapter published in Webster, EC & Von Holdt, K. Beyond the Apartheid Workplace: Case Studies in Transition. Durban: University of KwaZulu Natal Press. The chapter closely examines four factories in the engineering industry of South Africa in order to understand continuities and discontinuities with the ‘apartheid workplace regime' described by Karl von Holdt. In the context of the breakdown of the racial division of labour in the workplace, wage and job colour bars still operate informally.