Labor Unrest in South Africa, 1870-1990

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Mark Beittel (1995). Labor Unrest in South Africa, 1870-1990. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 18, No. 1, special issue 'Labor Unrest in the World-Economy, 1870-1990'. Research Foundation of SUNY for the Fernand Braudel Center.

Type	journal article
Scope	Economics and economic history of apartheid
Method	descriptive quantitative
Period studied	1870–1990
Regions	South Africa, Witwatersrand, Kimberley, Natal, Eastern Cape
Themes	unions strikes, methods data sources, resistance social movements, labour markets wages, mining migrant labour, politics ideology elections
Citation key	beittel1995

Argument

Beittel gives a periodised narrative of South African labour-capital conflict from the 1870s to 1990 and uses it as a set of 'stylized facts'. He tests two quantitative indicators against these facts: the World Labor Research Working Group (WLG) indicator, based on mentions of unrest in the Times (London) and New York Times indexes, and the government strike statistics. Wave-years are identified with the Shorter-Tilly and Bordogna-Provasi criteria. He finds that government strike counts generate many false positives. Working days lost fits better, but it misses politicised stay-aways. The WLG indicator is better at picking out disruptive turning points in labour-capital-state relations, though it is biased by British press interest and wartime newsprint shortages.

Evidence and method

Government strike statistics (National Manpower Commission 1986; Central Statistical Services 1989, 1991) covering 1910-1990; the WLG database of 2,306 Times (London) and 487 New York Times mentions, 1906-1990; secondary literature on South African labour history (Lewis, O'Meara, Bonner, Moodie, Davies and others).

Place in the debates

• Labour history versus social history in studying worker protest (see Worker consciousness, strikes and conflict on the mines and shop floor). Notes that labour history focuses on organised protest and strikes, while social history captures informal protest outside the workplace. Treats both as necessary and builds an indicator meant to capture politicised stay-aways as well as strikes.
• Reliability of official strike statistics versus press-based indicators of unrest (see Data reliability and econometric method). Argues that the government statistics are poorly documented, incomplete before 1917, exclude the nominally independent homelands, and omit political stay-aways. The WLG press indicator is a better guide to disruptive turning points, despite British-press bias.
• Which wave-identification method fits South Africa (Shorter-Tilly strike counts versus days lost) (see Data reliability and econometric method). The strike-count method yields 27 wave years with many false positives. The days-lost method (Bordogna-Provasi) fits the stylized facts fairly well and is the best comparator for the WLG indicator.

Findings

• Black worker unrest in 1985-87 was the postwar peak and marked a shift in the relationship between labour, capital and the state. (p. 6)

  the level, extent, and duration of Black labor unrest during 1985-87 mark these three years the peak of labor-capital conflict not only for the decade but for the entire postwar period.

• The 1973 Durban-area strikes by Black industrial workers ended an era of 'industrial peace' and won quick wage gains. (p. 5)

  These strikes were notable for their seeming spontaneity, their resistance to suppression, and their phenomenal success- in many factories workers won immediate increases in pay.

• In the 1980s migrant workers and homeland residents, previously thought hard to mobilise, became the backbone of unions that forced concessions from the state. (p. 6)

  Workers who had previously been considered all but impossible to mobilize- migrant workers and homeland residents- became the backbone of unions that forced the government to make unprecedented concessions

• During the Second World War the Black-white wage gap narrowed for the first time in South African history. (p. 4)

  there was not only an increase in real earnings by Africans but even- for the first time in South African history- a decline in the wage gap between Black and White workers

• Official strike statistics are poorly documented and underreport recent unrest; the 1986 figure is implausibly low. (p. 7)

  the government reports 1.3 million working days lost for that year while a reputable industrial relations consultant maintains that a conservative figure which took into account stay-aways would be at least three times as high

• The Shorter-Tilly method applied to strike counts yields too many wave years and misses key ones. (p. 8)

  Applying the same technique to the South African data generates a list of 27 wave years- more than a third of the total years.

• The days-lost indicator misses the 1950s politicised protest because stay-aways were not counted as strikes. (p. 11)

  much of the labor protest during these years consisted of political stay-aways, which were not considered by the compilers of the government statistics to be strikes.

• Both the WLG and days-lost indicators agree on the key wave-years of South African labour history. (p. 8)

  Both the WLG "mentions" indicator and the days-lost indicator identify as wave-years 1922, 1947, 1973-74, 1980, and 1985-87

• The Times (London) heavily outreports the New York Times, especially early in the century, reflecting British interests and a possible bias. (p. 15)

  for the period 1906 to 1930, the ratio is more than 10:1 while for the period 1960 to 1990 it is 3:1.

• The two newspaper indicators show a high degree of consistency, and the Times (London) is the better guide from the late 1950s. (p. 17)

  a comparison with the New York Times reveals a high degree of agreement between the indexes of the two newspapers; it also shows that the Times (London) is a somewhat better indicator

Evidence ledger

Sources used

Source	Kind	Period	How used
South African government strike statistics (number of strikes, workers involved, working days lost), 1910-1985, in National Manpower Commission, Certain Aspects of Strikes in South Africa, RP 113/1986, Annexure C, Table 1	official statistical series	1910-1985	Supplies the days-lost, strikes and workers-involved series from which wave-years are calculated and compared with the WLG newspaper indicator.
South African Labour Statistics 1991 (strike statistics for recent years)	official statistical series	c.1986-1990	Extends the government strike series to 1990.
South African Labour Statistics 1989 (definition of strikes after the 1980s methodological change)	official statistical series	1980s	Cited for the changed definition of strike incidents, which supposedly now include sympathy and political strikes; the author doubts this.
Union of South Africa, Official Year Book No. 8, 1923	official statistical series	pre-1917	Original publication cited to show that strike statistics before 1917 are extremely incomplete.
World Labor Research Working Group (WLG) database: mentions of labor unrest in the Times (London) Index	newspapers periodicals	1906-1990	Forms the main WLG indicator of labor unrest waves for South Africa, which is evaluated against the stylized facts and strike statistics.
New York Times Index mentions of labor unrest in South Africa	newspapers periodicals	1906-1990	Used to test the reliability of the Times (London)-based indicator by calculating wave-years separately and comparing the results.
Private labor consultancy strike figures (Indicator South Africa strike trend indicators)	secondary literature compilation	late 1970s-1984	Mentioned as alternative strike figures that differ from the government series but rely partly on it; not used directly.
Markham & Matiko (1987) industrial relations consultant estimate of working days lost in 1986 including stay-aways	secondary literature compilation	1986	Used to show that official 1986 days-lost figures understate unrest, since a conservative count including stay-aways would be at least three times higher.

Inference

Quantification: Descriptive tables.

Methodological comparison. Wave-years are calculated using Shorter and Tilly's 50%-above-five-year-mean rule (and a days-lost variant following Bordogna and Provasi) on government strike statistics and on Times (London) and New York Times mentions. They are then judged against a qualitatively derived set of 'stylized facts' drawn from the secondary labor-history literature, with false positives and misses assessed by case.

Key claims

Claim	Basis	Strength
The government strike statistics are the only quantitative series of comparable length, but they are poorly documented, incomplete before 1917 and politically shaped, and they cover only conventional strikes. (p. 92)	National Manpower Commission RP 113/1986, the 1927 Official Year Book and the Central Statistical Services publications. The author compares the notes in the original publications with later reprints and notes the exclusion of the homeland areas.	Partial data
Applying the Shorter-Tilly number-of-strikes criterion to South African data yields 27 wave years, many of them false positives, so it does not represent the stylized facts well. The working-days-lost criterion performs best. (p. 93)	Calculation on the government strike series, assessed against stylized facts from the labor-history literature.	Partial data
The WLG (Times London) and days-lost indicators both identify 1922, 1947, 1973-74, 1980 and 1985-87, the key moments in South African labor history. (p. 93)	WLG database wave-years (Table 1) compared with wave-years from the government days-lost series for 1915-1990.	Systematic data
The WLG indicator captures politicized unrest such as the 1950s stay-aways (1957, 1959-60) because the press reported them, whereas the official statistics did not treat them as strikes. It also distinguishes disruptive from routinized unrest better than the days-lost series. (p. 96)	Comparison of WLG wave-years with days-lost wave-years, which flag many more years such as 1961, 1964, 1972 and 1979-87.	Partial data
The WLG indicator misses the 1919-20 and 1941-46 wave-years, likely because of the Times paper shortage, underreporting in 1920 and press bias, which makes the Times-based indicator weaker for the war years. (p. 98)	Counts of Times mentions (50 in 1919, 26 in 1920, 25 in 1946) compared against wave thresholds. The explanation is conjectural and the author says the articles were not examined.	Illustrative or anecdotal
The Times (London) and New York Times indicators agree on ten of fourteen wave-years, but the New York Times does not separate labor unrest from general popular protest (e.g. 1976 Soweto) and is a weaker index than the Times (London) from the late 1950s. (p. 100)	Wave-years calculated separately from the two newspaper-index series (2,306 Times mentions; 487 New York Times mentions) and compared with the stylized facts.	Partial data
Times (London) coverage reflects British interests, so the Times-to-New York Times mention ratio was above 10:1 in 1906-30 and 3:1 in 1960-90. This makes the WLG indicator entirely dependent on the Times and potentially biased, as with the 1913 peak. (p. 100)	Comparison of annual mention counts in the two indexes (mean 27 for the Times against 6 for the NYT).	Partial data

The author's caveats

The author notes that the strike statistics are poorly documented, incomplete before 1917 (and for 1915, 1925 and 1929, which are treated as zero or missing), exclude the homelands, and changed definitions in the 1980s. The WLG series rests on index mentions rather than coded article content, depends entirely on the Times (London) with its war-time paper shortage and British-interest bias, and the article contents were not examined.

Gaps in the evidence

The 'stylized facts' against which the indicators are tested come from secondary literature and are not independently coded, so the test is partly circular. Coding the underlying newspaper articles for type, race of workers, size and issue, and triangulating with South African press, police and Native Affairs Department archives, would test the indicators better. Many of these records existed then and can be consulted in archives now. Recovering the compilation methods behind the strike statistics from the departmental files would also help.

Replicability: Data described but not public.