‘The Hand that Gives and the Hand that Takes’: The Taming of Zimbabwe Medical Doctors Industrial Job Action

Abstract

The literature on repression and path dependence provides a solid theoretical tradition for understanding how regimes contain and repress protests and strikes. Less well-understood is how and why regimes react in the manner they do in containing industrial job action from critical and essential service sectors such as public doctors. Answering these questions is pertinent not only for advancing scholarly insights on repression literature but also for understanding the state’s power, character and worker resistance in Africa. Utilizing the Zimbabwean case study, the article examines public hospital doctors’ labour protests during 2018 and 2019. The article contends that how repressive regimes respond to collective job action is shaped by path dependence.