Rustenburg's labour recruitment regime: shifts and new meanings

Abstract

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.

South African mineworkers' perspectives on the right to refuse dangerous work and the constraints to worker self-regulation

“…Worldwide, it is well established that contractors are vulnerable with respect to workplace hazards OHS (Tucker, 2013;Gunningham, 2008), as has been reported on South African mines (Loewenson, 2001;Bezuidenhout and Kenny, 1999;Hermanus, 2007). As the employment of contract workers increases, specifically on South African platinum mines (Forrest, 2015), the finding that they are less equipped to respond to a dangerous workplace is of concern.…”

How worker health and safety representatives are captured and outdone by production on South African mines

“…Contract workers because of their precarious position in the workplace worldwide are repeatedly shown in studies to be vulnerable to poor OHS outcomes (Gunningham, 2008;Quinlan, 2013). Certainly the significant rise of outsourced contract labour on platinum mines in South Africa contributes to a non-compliant safety culture, either because contractors consent to work in some of the most insecure areas, or because they lack equipment for the job, and because contract workers who work for labour brokers, who supply contract labour against production agreements, have reported injuries that are hidden in the interest of keeping the mine open and producing (Forrest, 2015).…”

“…The proliferation of contract labour on mines adds to this complexity. Forrest (2015) describes how on platinum mines there are wide disparities between the payment structures of workers doing the same job of a rock drill operator, with contract workers almost always being paid less. On gold mines, the improvised strategies of mineworkers and frontline supervisors to overcome common obstacles to the production process, to meet production targets (termed 'planisa'), is a well-documented case of the supremacy of these targets in the contemporary mining workplace (Phakathi, 2018).…”

Crisis Narratives and the African Paradox: African Informal Economies, COVID‐19 and the Decolonization of Social Policy

“…Considerable formal sector control of the economy has led to the paradoxical co‐existence of small economically weak informal economies with high levels of unemployment (see Table 3 ). In place of complex indigenous business networks, Southern African informal economies are shaped by the institutional infrastructure of the migrant labour system, repurposed in contemporary times as labour brokers who supply cheap informal labour to export agriculture and formal sector firms (Forrest, 2015 ; du Toit, 2004 ). In South Africa, Namibia and some other parts of Southern Africa, labour broking has become widespread in mining, agriculture, manufacturing and a range of public as well as private services, facilitating the penetration of unprotected informal labour relations into the heart of the formal sector (Forrest, 2015 ; Theron and Visser, 2010 ; Visser, 2016 ; Webb, 2017 ).…”