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Convict Labour, Industrialists and the State in the US South and South Africa, 1870-1930

Literature › Works

William H. Worger (2004). Convict Labour, Industrialists and the State in the US South and South Africa, 1870-1930. Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Special Issue: Race and Class in South Africa and the United States). Taylor & Francis (Carfax).
Type journal article
Scope Comparative and methods
Method archival narrative
Period studied 1870–1930
Regions Kimberley, Cape Colony, Birmingham, Alabama, US South
Themes origins segregation, mining migrant labour, labour markets wages, unions strikes, business and state, comparative theory, agriculture land
Citation key worger2004

Argument

Worger compares convict labour in Birmingham, Alabama (coal, iron and steel) and Kimberley (diamonds) to test three historiographical debates: US-South African comparison, race versus class, and industrialisation and prisons. He argues that capital-hungry industrialists with high fixed costs and competitive pressures used state-supplied convicts to cheapen labour, introduce machine production and defeat organised labour. Employers, not workers, used race to divide the workforce and segregate the workplace. Local and regional states backed leasing because it brought revenue and 'disciplined' or 'civilised' black offenders. He concludes that the two cases were strikingly similar despite Fredrickson's emphasis on differences.

Evidence and method

Cape Archives (Colonial Office, Government House files), Cape Parliamentary Papers (convict station and prison reports, Inspector of Diamond Mines), De Beers archives, and Alabama convict inspectors' and managers' biennial and quadrennial reports. Also legislative testimony (1889), Alabama Coal Operators' Association papers and other Birmingham Public Library collections, the Birmingham News, Maurice Evans's 1915 travel account, and a wide secondary literature (Mancini, Lichtenstein, Ayers, McKiven, Letwin, Cvornyek, Curtin).

Findings

  • State-supplied convicts were the cheapest, most controlled and most flexible labour in both societies. (p. 2)

    the state succeeded in creating what, for a time, was the most strictly controlled, the cheapest and the most flexible labour force in the world - convicts.

  • Pass law arrests were so numerous that most African adult men probably experienced prison. (p. 7)

    Yet the level of pass law arrests - over 20,000,000 between 1920 and the abolition of the system at the end of the 1980s - suggests that a majority of African adult males had seen the inside of a prison.

  • Kimberley employers used criminal-law contracts and the pass law to shift the terms of labour in their favour in the 1870s. (p. 9)

    They instituted labour contracts enforceable through criminal law against workers (but only through civil proceedings against employers)

  • Convict labour was far cheaper than free labour in Birmingham's mines. (p. 14)

    not only did Birmingham convicts cost 39 cents per day compared with $1.75 for non-convict labour

  • Employers openly valued convicts as a weapon against strikes and combination. (p. 14)

    convict labor competing with free labor is advantageous to the mine owner. If all were free miners they could combine and strike, and thereby put up the price of coal

  • De Beers' convict force grew to a large share of its workforce and was held in the colony's largest convict station. (p. 11)

    By 1905, De Beers had 1,200 convicts at work, men drawn from every part of the Cape

  • Convicts enabled De Beers' compound system and racial segregation without being their cause. (p. 15)

    The use of convict labour had not caused closed compounding, racial separation, and reduced job opportunities, but it had made their implementation possible.

  • Convict mortality at Alabama's Coalburg mine was extremely high compared with the general population. (p. 15)

    found a death rate of 90/1,000 among men 'in the prime of life' compared with a general rate for all of Birmingham (including the very young and the very old) of 13/1,000

  • After the 1908 defeat of the UMW, Birmingham's workforce became majority black, non-union and largely convict-trained. (p. 20)

    the proportion of black workers on the mines increased to 70 per cent, a majority of whom had first learned their trade as convict labourers

  • De Beers dropped convicts in the Depression, while the South African state shifted hiring-out toward Afrikaner farmers. (p. 22)

    but more frequently and in greater numbers to Afrikaner farmers as cheap agricultural workers.

  • Convict leasing gave states a major revenue stream, explaining official enthusiasm. (p. 24)

    because of the enormous financial benefits to their administrations of selling prison labour (providing over 10 per cent of Alabama's state revenue)

  • Employers, not workers, drove racial division of the workplace for reasons of cost. (p. 24)

    It was employers such as DeBardeleben and Roden and Rhodes, and not the members of the Knights or the UMW, who during the transition to and consolidation of machine production favoured racial division in the workplace