Privileged Precariat: White Workers and South Africa’s Long Transition to Majority Rule by Danelle van Zyl-Hermann

Abstract

The onset and maintenance of apartheid involved the taming of white labor unions and the convincing of members that their interests lay with rigid segregation and protection of their jobs. When black resistance and globalizing economic pressures eroded the alliance of dominant white social strata, neither the racial state nor capitalism had use for such social engineering. Historically, only black workers undertook laboring, and as they increasingly moved into semi-skilled occupations, historians who had given considerable attention to pre–World War II white laborers and their contradictory militancy, were now inclined to neglect them. Scholars began to view white workers as largely supervisors—notably, those in the Mine Workers’ Union (mwu), which has, however, since the 1994 demise of apartheid, recast itself as the ethnic- and broad-based Solidarity Movement.Van Zyl-Hermann—deftly combining sources across the disciplines of history, politics, economics, and labor studies—revises the periodization of the late apartheid era as well as conceptions of how Afrikaner wage earners clung to class and whiteness. The dismantling of the racial state, she argues, began long before 1994, in the 1970s, with the gradual withdrawal of state support for job reservation. Whites felt their world becoming precarious, and the chilly winds of globalization, deindustrialization, and deskilling shrank, divided, and weakened the working class. Working lives, however, have always been fraught with uncertainty. Earlier historians noted how the South African state and employers allowed white wage earners stability and higher wages only so long as it served their interests.1 Van Zyl-Hermann not only shows that insecurity is the norm in contemporary neoliberal capitalism, but she also persuasively traces how it feeds into the politics and culture of white “workers.” Van Zyl-Hermann reports that “white workers did not unproblematically disappear into the middle class”; by 1980, 31 percent of Afrikaners still remained in blue-collar jobs and 29 percent in 1991. White employees continued to comprise a sizeable fraction of skilled workers, although deindustrialization and casualization tended to fragment this stratum. As an Afrikaner unionist on the other side of the political fence commented, “What was left of the white working class in 1976 was mainly in skilled and supervisory jobs.”2 Although she agrees with other scholars that white mine blasters “simply supervised” (74), she argues nonetheless that their relationship to production was less significant than that to the racial state.Van Zyl-Hermann connects mwu politics and strategies both with support for apartheid and gradually increasing criticism of the ruling National Party (np) that introduced the policy. Drawing from union records, little-used transcripts of the Wiehahn Commission, and minutes of the Afrikaner Broederbond Labour Committee (which included Nic Wiehahn and Frederik W. de Klerk), she draws attention to the neglected involvement of white labor in the landmark commission and the np’s abandonment of job reservation, sparking the 1982 split to form the Conservative Party (cp). Moving to the post-apartheid period, she makes good use of interviews and the union’s official published organ, its minutes, and its correspondence to explicate how it transitioned from union to social movement. The organ shaped and reflected reader views but was tightly controlled; the absence of any mention of letters to the editor or members’ contributions underscores the fact that this book is more often than not a history of officials than of the rank-and-file. Her account borrows from Visser’s mwu histories that cover much the same period but goes beyond his more institutional focus.3Van Zyl-Hermann details the far-right politics of union leaders; some of them supported or took part in the breakaway cp and played a role in the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), the Afrikaner Volksfront, and the Freedom Front. Although she notes that np labor legislation “did not go uncontested within organised labour” (64), she makes no mention of progressive white (including Afrikaner) unionists who existed as a tiny minority in mixed-race unions.From the 1990s, the mwu absorbed other white unions under a new bourgeois leader, Flip Buys. Under his leadership, “class-based claims were completely effaced” in favor of ethnicity (194); in 2001, mwu became Solidarity. Van Zyl-Hermann perceptively analyzes the organization’s “highly selective, even intentionally misleading,” narratives in the media and even in a staff seminar that she attended. Such propaganda was intended to obscure the apartheid era, represent democratization negatively, attack desegregation as anti-white discrimination, and, like earlier Afrikaner nationalist movements, freely deploy stereotypes about the history of Afrikaners to allege their enduring plight and bolster Solidarity’s claim to uphold a Christian trade unionism.Hamstrung by limited access to membership records, she gives less attention to assessing the depth of Solidarity’s appeal. Appealing to better-educated employees, cozying up to business, pursuing multiple court cases to contest affirmative action, and operating outside state structures by establishing its own educational, financial, and welfare institutions, Solidarity was able to amass 300,000 members, the bulk of Afrikaner employees, by 2015. White membership in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) the largest labor federation, was only 1 percent of its 1.8 million total in 2012; the 2011 census recorded 2.7 million Afrikaners.Chapters 6 and 7 explore Solidarity’s official discourse to reveal senior and lower-level officials’ differences with shop stewards. Although based on a small sample of only twenty interviewees—five leaders and the rest anonymous blue-collar veterans (including an electrician, millwright, fitter, and a production foreman)—sub-narratives nevertheless emerge that are more class-based than are Solidarity’s public pronouncements. Unlike peak officials who claimed that “class has never really been an Afrikaner thing,” Van Zyl-Hermann sees Solidarity now “as a middle-classed … corporate organization” (249–250); rank-and-filers see the significant transformation as the crumbling of job reservation from the late 1970s to 1980s, rather than the demise of apartheid in 1994.This sensitive case study well demonstrates continuities and shifts in the union, and leaders’ private arrogance regarding blue-collar workers as they exploited Afrikaner culture. Van Zyl-Hermann, an Afrikaner, gained enough trust from Solidarity to facilitate interviews, and her cogent criticisms provide valuable insights into the little-studied movement. She innovatively theorizes that Solidarity strategies combined state-like and market-based aspirations, offering benefits but only for a limited segment of the population. Most authors see social movements as supporting vulnerable communities, but she characterizes Solidarity as more ambiguous, embracing neoliberal rationales but also pursuing the re-establishment “of apartheid style separate development—only now privatised” (240). She notes a lacuna in longitudinal sociological surveys of white workers; hopefully, the book will stimulate work to fill it. Despite the emphasis on class, she presents only a single statistical table of labor-force distribution. More use of post-1990 census statistics would have bolstered her argument and given more attention to workers and their workplaces. Though admirably spanning fifty years, the book does not manage to widen the geographical scope much beyond the Rand.Van Zyl-Hermann fills a major gap in the literature about white labor to force a re-consideration of whether white employees were a labor aristocracy or, as she sees them, a precariat; when compared to black workers and the unemployed, they might best be described as a precarious labor aristocracy. She lays bedrock for further research and shows the value of interdisciplinary history by weaving together political, economic, and cultural components of this fractured class. Changes to the nature of the workforce due to globalization make her approach germane, since it has become increasingly difficult to define the working class. She draws compelling parallels with the economic fate of white American workers and the rise of Donald Trump, underlining the contemporary salience of this well-written, well-sourced book—a welcome return to a focus on class (a distinctly “Afrikaner thing”’ [309]) that simultaneously incorporates identity analysis.