Coloured Labour Preference policy in the Western Cape¶
Was the Coloured Labour Preference policy economically rational or ideological, and whom did it serve?
Works engaging the debate: 6
Positions¶
- Labour-supply explanation (Lacey) vs political and ideological (Goldin)
- No evidence of African-Coloured competition
- Employer preference vs state compulsion
Evidence base¶
The six works argue the Coloured Labour Preference question from a narrow base: a few author-run surveys, official population and administrative series, and recycled policy statements. Lacey's labour-supply position is named in the debate but no Lacey evidence ledger is present, so its evidence cannot be assessed here. The strongest labour-market evidence comes from two Cape Town fieldwork programmes. Bekker and Coetzee (1980) rests on a November 1978 Greater Cape Town employer survey (519 firms, 480 usable for cross-tabulation), which records preferences by skill level and average weekly wages for unskilled and semi-skilled contract, permanent black and coloured workers. It adds an October 1978 household survey in Gugulethu and Langa and the Peninsula Administration Board consolidated Labour Returns for 1974-78, the one genuinely systematic series in the debate. Goldin (1984) draws on several sources. These are a hostel questionnaire (383 valid African respondents), a non-random grid-sample employer postal survey with twenty in-depth firm interviews, and the Schneier random house survey of Langa, Nyanga and Gugulethu. To these Goldin adds interviews with officials and unionists, Cape Chamber of Industries yearbooks 1954-77, and Population Census returns for Peninsula magisterial districts from 1904 to 1970. Theron Commission occupational tables (RP 38/1976, Tables 4-5) and a contract-worker series (Table 1) complete the base; Goldin himself calls Table 1 incomplete and untrustworthy. Katzen (1962) is earlier and illustrative. It uses the 1960 census (118,000 Africans out of about 1.2 million in the Western Cape) and municipal and divisional registered-employment counts (48,000 Africans in June 1962). It also cites the 1954/55 and 1956/57 industrial censuses, a rough Peninsula unemployment figure of about 7,000, and a Caltex anecdote.
Contested evidence¶
Four points of disagreement run through the evidence ledgers.
The first is the core economic question: whether African and Coloured workers competed. Katzen (Katzen (1962)) asserts complementarity, claiming Africans were 'ninety per cent unskilled' and freed Coloureds to move into skilled work, but offers no occupational breakdown by race. Goldin (Goldin (1984)) supports segmentation with a twenty-firm table: 87% of Africans unskilled against 25% of Coloureds and no whites. He reads this as evidence against any competitive rationale for the policy. Bekker and Coetzee (1980) finds the same skill gradient, with employers preferring black (especially contract) labour at unskilled and semi-skilled levels and coloured labour at skilled and clerical levels. Bekker's wage table, however, shows contract workers paid less than permanent black and coloured workers at the same skill level. That opens a substitution reading: cheapness, not complementarity, drove employer preference, so the policy did bind on employers.
The second concerns employers' stance, where the debate rests on two different kinds of evidence. Goldin's Chamber of Industries yearbooks and interviews suggest employers accepted influx control and resented only its uneven enforcement. Bekker's survey reports that most employers would hire more blacks if the policy were abolished. Each is used to place the policy on the 'employer preference versus state compulsion' axis, but one is association rhetoric and the other is stated preference.
The third is the ideological reading. In Goldin (1984), (West (1982)), ((ed.) et al. (1983)) and Bekker and Coetzee (1980) it rests on the same small canon: Eiselen's 1955 SABRA address, ministerial statements of 1954 and 1963 in Hansard, and a Riekert remark. (ed.) et al. (1983) explicitly classes its claim of 'no economic basis' as asserted rather than demonstrated. The commonly cited figure of 42% 'illegal' Africans (85,436 of 199,600) is a single 1981 answer by the minister Koornhof, reused by both (West (1982)) and (ed.) et al. (1983) rather than independently corroborated.
The fourth is a counterpoint from Namaqualand. Sharp (Sharp and West (1984)) presents O'okiep Copper Company employment for 1974, 1975 and 1982 showing Coloured workers replacing African and white workers. Read against the Cape Town claims of no competition, this is the only firm-level series in the debate showing actual racial substitution under the preference regime. It also comes from a distinctive regional labour market.
Underused and missing sources¶
The sources that would settle the substitution question and measure enforcement are named in the evidence ledgers' own gap notes but appear in none of the works: - labour bureau placement and refusal records; - Department of Labour and Administration Board registers, including requisitions refused under the 1966 freeze; - Langa Commissioner's Court registers (West observed only two sample days); - tracking of deportees and returnees; - consistent wage and unemployment series by race for the Western Cape.
Industrial census returns broken down by race and occupation over 1950-80 would allow a proper test of Katzen's complementarity claim and Goldin's claim that Coloured wages deteriorated. Yet each is used only for a single year or for regional employment shares. Lacey's own evidence is absent from the corpus.
First, Population Census tabulations: distribution series for 1904-1960 plus 1960 and 1970 tables. These could rebuild the district-level racial population series underlying (Goldin (1984)), (Katzen (1962)) and Bekker and Coetzee (1980) and check the 1951-1960 African population growth Sharp reports for Namaqualand. Second, Government Gazette indexes for 1920-78 together with labour bureaux gazettes. These would let the implementation chronology be dated from primary notices, notably the 1962 application, the 1965 Black Labour Regulations and the 1966 freeze, rather than from secondary summaries. They speak directly to whether the policy was first articulated in 1954-55, as Goldin argues, or applied administratively from 1962, as Bekker has it.
Strength of key claims¶
| Basis | Share of key claims |
|---|---|
| Systematic data | 7% |
| Partial data | 62% |
| Illustrative or anecdotal | 16% |
| Asserted | 16% |
Comparative figures for all debates are on the Literature overview.
Best-evidenced works¶
Bekker and Coetzee (1980), Goldin (1984), West (1982), (ed.) et al. (1983)
Most-used primary sources¶
Holdings are matched by machine against the archive's file manifest; a dash means no match was found, not that the project certainly lacks the source.
Works and their positions¶
| Work | Position |
|---|---|
| (ed.) et al. (1983) | Argues the policy was not economic: no evidence of African-Coloured competition was produced, the Riekert Commission said it rested on non-economic grounds, and the BER (1981) advised scrapping it. The contributors read it as anti-African and tied to grand apartheid and a 'white homeland of last resort' idea. |
| Bekker and Coetzee (1980) | Employer preference for black labour at low skill levels is largely self-imposed and linked to experience of contract workers. Preference for coloured labour at skilled levels rests largely on regulation. The policy was applied only where the regional economy was not harmed. |
| Bekker and Coetzee (1980) | Partly. Contract workers earned less than permanent black and coloured workers, which influences employer preference. Most employers nonetheless opposed the policy, and the policy is shown to withhold skilled black labour from the economy. |
| Goldin (1984) | Goldin calls Lacey's view that strict control served to shore up Eastern Cape labour for the mines 'incomplete'. He stresses Hertzog's Coloured alliance, the Depression, and the National Party's strategic and ideological aims. |
| Goldin (1984) | Goldin rejects 'conspiratorial reified' interpretations and emphasises contradictions between employers and the state, while still reading labour control as maintaining a cheap and divided workforce. |
| Goldin (1984) | It did not benefit the unskilled bulk; Coloured wages relative to whites fell and Coloured workers were confined to the working class. |
| Katzen (1962) | Rejects the government claim (Botha) that Africans take Coloured jobs. He argues labour is not homogeneous and that African and Coloured labour are complementary, so removal would reduce Coloured employment. |
| Sharp and West (1984) | Sees the policy as flexible in practice, used adroitly by the employer, with Africans still occupying many jobs and Coloured workers lacking mobility. |
| West (1982) | Sceptical. He notes that no evidence has been produced that black labour competed with Coloured workers, and that the Riekert Commission recommended scrapping the policy on economic grounds. He treats the policy as driven by political and ideological aims. |