Rebels without a Cause of Their Own?

Abstract

This article explores the role played by white full-time union officials in the black unions that emerged in the wake of the 1973 Durban strikes. It asks how white officials could gain acceptance and play a central role in a movement of black workers in a context where black–white relations were characterized by a vast social distance, hostility and deep mutual mistrust between the two population groups. White officials, mainly from middle-class backgrounds, were never fully integrated into the class (and movement) with which they had decided to pledge solidarity. Erik Olin Wright's notion of ‘contradictory location’ is used to explain this incomplete integration. The social distance between white and black people in society continued to exist between white officials, on the one hand, and black workers and full-time officials, on the other. Power relations between white officials and black unionists remained unequal and white officials performed expert functions while black unionists performed more menial functions. The escalation of mass resistance against apartheid and the emergence within the black unions of a critical mass of younger black leaders and organic intellectuals, many previously leaders in the student and youth movements, changed the role and position of white officials and many retreated into policy work outside the union movement.