Mining capital, the state and unskilled white workers in South Africa, 1901–1913

Abstract

The policy not to employ unskilled whites in general labouring jobs in the South African goldmining industry was one crucial element in the make up of that industry's characteristic pattern of social relations to production. The restriction of unskilled white employment to certain defined job categories had the effect of transforming the division of labour which had developed in the nineteenth century-basically a skilled-unskilled division with certain racist features-into a rigid comprehensive racial division, within which wage earners of equivalent skill were divided on racial lines into occupations with different functions, income and status. One result of this feature of the goldmining industry is well known. It united in struggle those wage earners whose skin pigmentation happened to be white, across skill differentials, and led to their advocating and practising racial discrimination against African workers in defence of their jobs within that structure. The policy, however, had important consequences outside the immediate confines of the goldmining industry. The fact that the increasing numbers of white proletarians were not employed in general unskilled work, even when mining capitalists were complaining of labour shortages, was in no small measure responsible for the concentrations of unemployed whites in the major urban areas of South Africa, which was a feature of the period before extensive secondary industralization. Such concentrations were an important threat to the overall stability of the social formation2 and resulted in the state intervening,