In South Africa's democracy, the dismantling of the apartheid low-wage migrant labour system has been a stated goal of the state and trade unions. Through an investigation of the recruitment regime on the Rustenburg platinum belt, this article demonstrates how mine managements have responded to the goal of guaranteeing a continued supply of cheap and plentiful labour, how it has manipulated the unionised labour market, how it has ensured labour's consent in its project and how this has impacted on workers. Using Michael Burawoy's (1983) conceptual distinction between ‘despotic’ and ‘hegemonic’ labour regimes which embraces the idea of the politics of production, the article demonstrates how migrant labour recruitment patterns contain continuities, but have also fractured under the impact of neoliberal flexible labour patterns, the state's transformational laws which particularly impact on non-South African labour, and the local labour market characterised by deep structural unemployment. Workers have in some measure benefited from changed recruitment patterns, but for many it has rendered their position increasingly precarious and has simultaneously segmented the solidarity of labour, resulting in some segments of mine labour belonging to the new democratic dispensation more than others.

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Negotiations are a valuable and important tool for increasing the voice of workers in the informal economy. This paper provides empirical evidence from Africa, Asia and the Americas on negotiations and collective bargaining by workers in the informal economy. These practices demonstrate that negotiations involving workers in the informal economy, including those that culminate in collective agreements, are key to ensuring the fair distribution of the fruits of economic progress and labour protection to workers in many countries. They are also an important tool for reducing informalization trends. The paper also shows the multiple challenges workers in the informal economy are facing when organizing and entering into negotiations and outlines some possible pathways on how these can be reduced.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) at times played an important role in challenging race discrimination in the workplace, both as apartheid legislation intensified and in the new democratic South Africa. The controversy around forced labor, and the participation of independent African countries in the ILO, ultimately led to the withdrawal of South Africa. Subsequently, ILO Conventions and the 1964 Declaration influenced the government to establish the 1978 Wiehahn Commission to examine industrial relations. Its recommendations led to extensive unionization. The ILO was initially reluctant to recognize the independent unions but subsequently worker organizational power led to its support. Later, it contributed to creating a post-apartheid workplace order. However, despite its intention to build an inclusive industrial relations system, many workers remain excluded from the regulatory framework and the labor movement. The ILO’s rigid binary between direct coercion on the one hand and the voluntary recruitment of workers on the other does not capture the continuity from slavery, indentured labor, and the migrant labor system through to use of casual labor in contemporary South Africa. The ILO seems more comfortable with traditional unions and clear-cut employer-employee relationships.

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