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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Worker agency in colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid gold mining workplace regimes |
Author: | Phakathi, Timothy Sizwe |
Year: | 2012 |
Periodical: | Review of African Political Economy (ISSN 0305-6244) |
Volume: | 39 |
Issue: | 132 |
Pages: | 279-294 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | labour policy gold mining miners labour history |
External link: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03056244.2012.688806 |
Abstract: | This paper locates the understanding of the organization of work and worker agency on South African gold mines within the context of the racialization and deracialization of the economic and labour market strategies of the colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid mining regimes. It argues that as much as racial and coercive labour practices profited the gold mining companies, they were not sustainable. The mineworkers were not passive acceptors of racial and coercive forms of labour control. The post-apartheid work order led to the restructuring of the gold mining workplace towards efficiency, productivity and equity. This signalled a shift from worker coercion to consent in the day-to-day running of the production process inside the pit. The paper calls attention to workers' subjective orientation, agency and resilience to repressive and contemporary work structures - not just as recipients but also as shapers of such work structures within the politics, limits and contradictions of capitalist production systems. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract] |