Abstract. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the 1950s and 1960s, conservative governments in the 1980s have not been punished by the electorate for rising or enduring mass unemployment. Part of the explanation for this can be found in the specific content and functioning of ideological discourse regarding unemployment. This article develops the idea that parties’electoral strategies can be seen as forms of ideological interpellations. In the empirical part of the article we show that by their ideological discourse government parties succeed in mitigating and making acceptable the unemployment problem.
SummaryThe first two decades of South Africa's history is characterised as a period of serious endemic industrial unrest and violence, when the labour movement and capital were involved in regular conflict over labour issues and for control of the country's industrial work force. The level of violence in these conflicts was such that the government as a third party was repeatedly forced to intervene in the disputes and restore law and order by imposing martial law. This paper explores labour's attitude and responses to, as well as the consequences for labour, of the government's declarations of martial law during these disputes and in the First World War. Prologue to Martial Law: The First Military Interventions in Industrial DisputesIn the early decades of the 20th century no problem loomed so large as the labour problem. The scope and gravity of strikes were increasing. Industrial enterprises became concentrated in huge businesses, and those who ran them refused to make agreements which would allow trade unions to curtail their freedom; they were unwilling to share their authority. Without exception these business enterprises were hostile to the principle of collective bargaining. Skilled workers, who needed three years of apprenticeship, and more of practice to train, became the minority, overwhelmed by specialised unskilled workers who could be underpaid.Thus action by the workers was tending to become political just at the time when the nature of the state was changing. As the sate itself became more and more an employer, with numerous officials and workers, governments had to decide whether they could stand by while strikes spread to vital sectors in the nation's life. A state whose railwaymen, postmen, and miners were on strike was threatened with paralysis and could therefore ill-afford to stand aloof from industrial disputes. The strike, as a manifestation of collective action by workers, was more and more becoming a warning signal to invite the authorities to intervene actively and military intervention in industrial disputes often had bloody results. IIn the cosmopolitan mining community of the early da~s of the Witwatersrand goldmine industry, immigrants of British origin predominated. The predominantly British character of the miners, the habits of the British workshop and the tradition of the British trade unions established themselves on the Witwatersrand. Both the trade union and political
The South African Mine Workers' Union, or MWU, was one of the most prominent white trade unions of 20 th -century South Africa and active in one of the country's key industries, namely gold mining. In the aftermath of the violent 1922 strike, the union's executive was bureaucratised, which left the MWU vulnerable to corruption and maladministration. This gave rise to a protracted struggle for control of the union's executive. In the 1930s and 1940s the strife within MWU ranks became entangled with the national struggle for political hegemony between the National Party and the United Party, as well as Afrikaner nationalism. At the outbreak of World War II the Smuts cabinet armed the state under War Measures' Acts, which entitled it to a range of arbitrary powers, including powers to control strategic minerals, such as gold, and to curb industrial unrest. Naturally, the War Measures' Acts had a significant effect on the doings of the MWU -in particular the struggle for political control of its executive. The struggle involved three official commissions of inquiry into the affairs of the MWU, two mining strikes and numerous court actions between the two competing factions within its ranks. As a result of the stipulations of the War Measures' Acts pertaining to the mining industry, as well as those of the MWU constitution, a political impasse to solve the issue of democratic elections in the union arose. Therefore the War Measures' Acts still had legal repercussions for the union three years after the cessation of hostilities. As such, the War Measures' Acts 1 influenced politics and elections in the MWU as late as 1948.
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