Abstract
In this paper, we assess the South African labour movement's engagement with globalisation in the 1990s and its implications for labour politics in the following decade. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with key informants, we show that, although the labour movement had become committed to a ‘high road’, post-Keynesian restructuring vision by 1993, its representatives failed to pursue that vision consistently in the economic policy negotiations that preceded the historic 1994 democratic election. In fact, labour delegates actually agreed to several policy changes that were more in line with a ‘low road’, neo-liberal approach, with dramatic implications for workers in some sectors. The inability of labour's engagement with globalisation to benefit the working class has led to a long search for a new basis for union strategy.
Highlights
In the 1980s and 1990s, unionists and researchers looked to South Africa for inspiration
We argue that labour representatives interpreted globalisation as trade and investment liberalisation, and engaged with these challenges associated with global market integration in the early 1990s in a way that proved to be a major constraint on labour politics in the following decade, limiting the labour movement’s ability to deal with the impact of economic reforms in the post-apartheid period
The remainder of this paper focuses on these issues by uncovering the direct involvement of Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and other labour federations in several policy decisions centred on the tripartite National Economic Forum (NEF), where labour representatives put forward proposals for a post-Keynesian economic programme and where they participated in and supported key decisions that put South Africa firmly on the road to neo-liberal restructuring
Summary
Marlea Clarke is a post-doctoral fellow in the Labour Studies Programme at McMaster University in Canada and a research associate of the Labour and Enterprise Policy Research Group at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Carolyn Bassett is an assistant professor at the School of Social Sciences at York University in Toronto in Canada.
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