‘A Measure of Democracy’: Works Committees, Black Workers, and Industrial Citizenship in South Africa, 1973–1979

By the early 1970s the permanent, urbanised African working class in manufacturing had reached a critical mass. Frustrated by poor wages, pressed by an inflationary economy, and barred from state-sanctioned trade unions, African workers engaged in a series of explosive, spontaneous, strikes in Natal in 1973. Faced with this shop-floor turmoil, the South African business class recognized a looming crisis in the labour field, bemoaning a shortage of skilled labour, poor productivity, and a lack of mechanisms for negotiating with an increasingly restive African working class. Nevertheless, they did not want to accept fully recognised trade unions for Africans. Instead, in response to the strike wave, employers and the state expanded the existing system of works and liaison committees, which pretended to give official voice to African workers’ shop-floor grievances while refusing them the right to state-sanctioned unionisation and collective bargaining mechanisms. South African nationalist historiography regards these committees as collaborative structures, designed to co-opt workers. This article rejects that notion, and argues instead that Black workers and their allies used the committee structure to build a shop-floor infrastructure that emerged in the independent Black trade union movement in the 1980s.