From Compounded to Fragmented Labour: Mineworkers and the Demise of Compounds in South Africa

Abstract

At the core of colonial and apartheid social engineering was a spatial strategy based on institutions and infrastructure linking together rural homesteads and villages, and mining centers and towns. In the case of the mining industry, single-sex compounds were set up as the foundation of the infrastructure of control over black labor. In this paper we examine how various forms of control operated. We locate our contribution within the labor geography literature. We argue that it was not only state institutions and major corporations that shaped landscapes of control. In this regard we highlight the centrality of workers' agency, specifically the way in which the National Union of Mineworkers captured the compounds and subverted the logic of employer control. However, the union's successes as well as the advent of democracy have resulted in profound changes, thus presenting the union with new challenges.

Rustenburg's Fractured Recruitment Regime: Who Benefits?

“…It had considerable success in increasing job security and wages and in reducing workplace racism. Its attempts at abolishing hostels was more problematic however as the Living Out Allowance it negotiated was used to supplement wages while many workers resided in squalid settlements around mines (Bezuidenhout & Buhlungu 2011). The emergence of the NUM in 1984 brought changes which impacted on the migrant labour recruitment system, but significant modifications had already occurred a decade earlier when a process of shifting recruitment patterns occurred.…”

“…Thus it appears that mines are adhering to labour legislation while in fact a large proportion of its labour is hidden unorganised or weakly organised brokered workers. Through brokers, capital has divided permanent and contract workers from each other and deeply fragmented the labour force (Bezuidenhout & Buhlungu 2011). When permanent rock drillers on the platinum mines in 2012 revolted against the NUM, which they believed had been co-opted by management and demanded higher wages, they did not include contracted labour in their demands.…”

Enclave Rustenburg: platinum mining and the post-apartheid social order

“…In spite of these differences between mining firms regarding their use of compounds, the fact remains that the institution was initially designed as a form of spatial control by management, but once captured by the union, also proved to be an effective tool of union control over the movement of members during strikes (see Bezuidenhout & Buhlungu 2011). In part due to this turning of the tables by the union, and in part due to political pressure, mining companies sought to 'depopulate' the compounds from the 1990s onwards (Crush & James 1991).…”

Labour and Segmentation in Value Chains

“…In a study on the development of the compounds in the South African mining industry Bezuidenhout and Buhlungu (2011) present a useful differentiation of aspects of control: spatial control, reproductive control, associational control and political control. This related to restrictions on the movement of workers as they migrate as well as how they can move around compounds and the adjacent localities; the institution of single-sex compounds as well as the firm's monopoly on selling provisions; the regulation of union and other associational activities amongst workers; as well as the policing and coercive side of mining firms' control over workers and their living areas.…”