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Introduction: Comparing Race and Labour in South Africa and the United States

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Peter Alexander; Rick Halpern (2004). Introduction: Comparing Race and Labour in South Africa and the United States. Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Special Issue: Race and Class in South Africa and the United States). Taylor & Francis (Carfax Publishing).
Type journal article
Scope Comparative and methods
Method synthesis review
Period studied 1838–1994
Regions South Africa, Witwatersrand, Kimberley, Natal, Orange Free State, Transvaal, US South, Alabama, Louisiana
Themes comparative theory, origins segregation, mining migrant labour, labour markets wages, unions strikes, agriculture land, demography urbanisation, resistance social movements, business and state
Citation key alexander2004

Argument

The introduction presents a special issue of seven comparative articles on race and labour in South Africa and the US, and argues for qualitative, cross-national comparative history that combines local and global explanation. The collection mostly stresses similarities (labour-supply problems of emerging industries, urbanisation, trade-union patterns), but the editors restore balance by identifying South Africa's key difference: a cheap labour system backed by race-based legislation and specialised institutions. They accept two of Fredrickson's determinants (gold ore of poor quality at depth, and the African reserves) and extend his third, political one. Gold and the reserves are necessary but insufficient. The contrast must also be explained by the relative strength of imperial Britain and republican America at the two pivotal modernising conflicts, the Civil War and the South African War, and by the post-war settlements that followed them.

Evidence and method

Synthesis of the seven articles in the issue (Bonner, Halpern, Ochiltree, Worger, Alexander, Lichtenstein, Johanningsmeier) and of secondary literature (Fredrickson, Greenberg, Cell, Marx, Harries, Levy, Jeeves, Crush/Jeeves/Yudelman, Wolpe, McMichael). No original data are presented. A few figures are quoted from Marx and others.

Findings

  • South Africa's distinctive cheap labour system was in place by 1920 and underpinned the uniqueness of its labour history. (p. 7)

    Already, by 1920, South Africa had developed the distinctive 'cheap labour system' that underpinned much of the uniqueness of that country's labour history.

  • Early Rand wages were not low; cheapening was a deliberate 1896 Chamber of Mines decision driven by the poor quality and depth of the ore. (p. 7)

  • Post-1902 British measures (Mozambique recruiting monopoly, Chinese indentured labour, a unified state, Natives Land Act) consolidated the labour system. (p. 7)

    the importation of nearly 64,000 indentured Chinese labourers between 1904 and 1907; and the creation of a modern, unified South African state that would implement the pass laws more efficiently

  • Convict leasing was a major ultra-cheap labour source in both Kimberley and Birmingham, Alabama, and was used to divide organised labour and segregate the workplace. (p. 9)

    used to divide and defeat organised labour and to enable employers to segregate the workplace on the basis of race

  • The 1913 Natives Land Act and state support shifted the balance in sharecropping towards white owners and capitalist agriculture in South Africa. (p. 9)

    The 1913 Natives Land Act - which, for instance, included a ban on sharecropping in the Orange Free State - was particularly significant

  • Alexander explains the separate South African colliery strikes of 1920-22, versus united strikes in Alabama, by coerced migrant recruitment and by cohesive capital and state power under the cheap labour system. (p. 10)

    By contrast, most African colliers were coerced, oscillating migrants, whose entire lives distinguished them, in virtually every respect, from white colliers.

  • The key difference is a state-backed cheap labour supply system, which shaped male-dominated urban Black populations, deeper workforce racial divisions and slower progress to non-racial democracy. (p. 13)

    Unlike the United States - and, indeed, other countries as well - South Africa developed a system of cheap labour supply that was supported by race-based legislation and specialised institutions.

  • Gold quality and depth, plus the reserves as areas outside the white economic system, are central determinants of South African particularity (following Fredrickson and Wolpe). (p. 13)

    Crucially, the reserves were areas of subsistence farming that, as Fredrickson put it, 'were in some ways outside the white social and economic system'.

  • Post-war settlements sacrificed Black interests to white unity in both countries, but differences in the balance of forces explain divergent outcomes. (p. 14)

    In both countries the wars led to a new, unified state, but in the United States this was based on liberty, and in South Africa it was linked to an alliance of 'gold and maize'

  • Geo-physical and social factors are necessary but insufficient; relative imperial British and republican American strength at the two modernising conflicts must be added. (p. 15)

    Thus, geo-physical and social factors are necessary, but insufficient to explain the contrast between, on the one hand, labour supply that was consciously and systematically cheapened

  • Black worker militancy in South Africa in the 1970s-80s was more sustained than in the US, which raises the question of what conditioned it. (p. 10)

    On the South African side, black worker militancy reached a much higher plane and was more sustained than any similar movement in the United States.