Labour Market Restructuring and South Africa's Rural Homeland Communitiesin the 1980s

Abstract

ABSTRACT Given South Africa's history, rural communities in the periphery have always been the poorest of the poor with a long-run dependence on migrant remittances. In the 1980s there were vigorous debates about the importance of agricultural activities yet these analyses assumed that the nature of the interaction between these rural communities and the broader structures of South Africa's economy remained tied to long-range, unskilled migrant labour. While there was an expansion of migrant labour to the gold mines in the 1970s, there were other changes taking place in the South African labour market too. There was a capital deepening process within the manufacturing, mining and agriculture sectors leading to an increasing demand for skilled and some categories of semi-skilled labour and a sharply decreasing demand for unskilled labour. In addition, there was some spatial restructuring of South African industry and ‘self-governing’ or even ‘independence’ homelands spawned large public bureaucracies. Using empirical evidence from the 1980s this paper shows that these changes led to increasing participation of rural communities in regional and local labour markets. There was increased wage labour and weekly commuting and a number of these jobs were semi-skilled. These developments changed the nature of inequality and socioeconomic differentiation within rural communities. Those who were able to make adjustments to take advantage of restructured labour markets were notably better off relative to those who were not in a position to do this.