From Durban to Wiehahn: Black Workers, Employers, and the State in South Africa during the 1970s

NOTE: apologies for the somewhat misleading title. This paper, a follow up to one presented at a History Workshop conference at Wits a few years ago, looks more at the outcome of these struggles than the process of struggle during the 1970s itself. In that earlier paper I argued that between 1973 and 1980 Black workers proved able to use the feeble state reformist structures in a changing industrial relations regime—namely the works and liaison committees—to further their own ends. As this paper shows, that experience profoundly shaped the way the nascent Black trade union movement responded to the post-1979 re-working of South African labour law and industrial relations.