Privileged Precariat: White Workers and South Africa's Long Transition to Majority Rule

Quite naturally, the bulk of South African labor history focuses on the experience of Black workers and their significant contribution to the country's liberation from apartheid. Increasingly, though, scholars have turned their attention to the history of South Africa's small but powerful white working class. South Africa's white workers—its gold and coal miners in particular—have a rich history of both militancy and the embrace of racial privilege, most notoriously conjoined in the slogan advanced in a massive 1922 strike: “Workers of the World Unite for a White South Africa.” Indeed, as Danelle van Zyl-Hermann points out on several occasions in her study of the all-white (and predominantly Afrikaner) Mineworkers Union (MWU) and its postapartheid successor, Solidarity, the 1922 “Rand Revolt” “reverberated through the union throughout the twentieth century and remains an evocative reference point in the present,” providing “a pre-1948 founding myth untainted by apartheid” (71, 258).The class dynamics of apartheid among whites remain poorly understood, as van Zyl-Hermann notes. Historians often tell this as a straightforward story of embourgeoisement, as the once impoverished and exploited Afrikaner working class threw in its lot with Afrikaner nationalism, entering the relatively privileged ranks of protected labor, supervisory positions, and the civil service. This came at the expense of Black workers, and the price of the ticket was die-hard loyalty to the precepts of apartheid and to the National Party (NP) as their only reliable defender. This book argues instead that while “deeply invested in the oppression of their black counterparts,” “rather than a labor aristocracy, white workers represented a privileged precariat,” dependent as they were on the protection of the racial state (2, 37). Such dependence only grew with labor deskilling; only racialized job protections stood between white miners and displacement by cheaper Black labor.Van Zyl-Hermann's research is extremely impressive. Privileged Precariat is one of only a handful of English-language books in South African history resting predominantly on Afrikaans-language sources, including the personal papers of NP ministers, the MWU's paper Die Mynwerker, and the rarely used testimony before the Wiehahn Commission. As she readily admits, the author also gained extraordinary access to members of Solidarity, who accepted her as an “insider” on the basis of her own Afrikaner identity and ability to interview them in Afrikaans. Van Zyl-Hermann also makes good use of the verbatim proceedings of the all-white South African Parliament, in which ministers and MPs offered unvarnished justifications for apartheid. Finally, her examination of the records of the secretive Broederbond's labor committee offers an unusual peek at Afrikanerdom in the wake of the 1973 strikes by African workers, allowing her to measure parliamentary posturing against actual labor policy discussions behind the scenes. As van Zyl-Hermann points out, “The secret committee could admit to the tensions between apartheid's political-ideological and economic imperatives,” suggesting a good deal more ambivalence about defending white working-class privilege than is evident in the parliamentary debates (97). These extraordinary documents indicate that NP power brokers were well aware that “the fortunes of white and black labor were fundamentally entangled” in South Africa, ideological efforts to keep them siloed notwithstanding (98). When it came to promoting economic growth, the Afrikaner elite evinced a growing willingness to throw the South African white working class under the bus when confronted by the newly mobilized African working class. This is a highly original finding.The shifting emphasis to taming the emergent Black unions rather than protecting white workers at all costs opened the way for the creation of the 1977 Commission of Inquiry into Labour Legislation, also known as the Wiehahn Commission. Faced with “the potency of African labor discontent, the burden of international demands for reform, and the urgent need for economic growth,” the leaders of apartheid South Africa no longer would “pander to the interests of white workers,” van Zyl-Hermann concludes (114).Representatives of white unions were hardly unified in their testimony to the commission, van Zyl-Hermann shows. At one end, the more open unions reckoned that equal pay for equal work would be adequate protection against cheap African labor; at the other end of the spectrum, the exclusively white unions (like the MWU) refused to countenance any erosion of “an order in which they enjoyed protection from job insecurity, the degradation of white poverty, and the exploitation of capitalist employers” (129). In the end the exclusionary unions could not withstand the pressure for change: between 1980 and 1989, membership in white-only unions declined from 240,000 to less than 100,00, as white workers “found themselves in an industrial system working to dismantle racial privilege [in the workplace] only to preserve white supremacy in other spheres” (150). This “withdrawal of state support for working class whiteness,” van Zyl-Hermann contends, “marked the end of the post-war Afrikaner social alliance and moral economy” (151).The second half of Privileged Precariat examines how the MWU “experienced and negotiated the dismantling of the racial state” (158). Van Zyl-Hermann suggests that these white workers adapted by transforming a weakened union into a broad-based civil society organization, “drawing legitimacy from the global shift to identity politics” in an Afrikaner idiom (197). In contrast to most whites-only unions, the MWU—or Solidarity, as the union came to be called—actually grew during the last decade of apartheid, and expanded some more in the immediate postapartheid years, as white-collar and paraprofessional Afrikaners joined its ranks. The “union” that a century ago spearheaded a white working-class insurrection soon became “the largest Afrikaans membership organization in South Africa” (165). A class-based organization, she maintains, transformed into “a movement mobilized on the basis of cultural identity,” directing its hostility at the new Black-led government rather than white employers and capital (159).As a reconceptualization of the class fissures among whites that helped make apartheid unsustainable, Privileged Precariat breaks important new ground. Van Zyl-Hermann's provocative suggestion that the forces squeezing South Africa's Afrikaner workers replicated the neoliberal turn that undermined the post–World War II labor-state-capital accord in the rest of the developed world, however, is somewhat less persuasive. With its civil society endeavors, positing the “Afrikaner minority as an innocent of an immoral majority-ruled state,” Solidarity sought to reinvent the white-ruled racial state that the African National Congress had supplanted (219). Such Afrikaner revanchism, so reminiscent of the 1920s and 1930s, was likely to have occurred regardless of the growth of neoliberal discourse and deindustrialization. Even van Zyl-Hermann admits that Solidarity's “push against state intervention and towards private initiative” was driven more by animus against Black-majority government than by “commitment to neoliberal ideology” (239). Moreover, she argues, the nostalgic Afrikaner nationalism that underwrote Solidarity ultimately proved unable to paper over the “irreconcilable class-based differences” between the working-class holdovers from the MWU and the organization's new middle-class constituency (242). In short, as her fascinating interviews with both groups disclose, sharp class differences continue to override putative ethno-racial solidarity.US labor historians concerned with the race-class conundrum might read this superb book one of two ways. The history of the MWU certainly offers a potent illustration of how tenaciously white workers cling to their privileged position in a racialized labor market. At the same time, there are few better examples of the willingness of political and economic elites to abandon a white working class for whom they had once pledged undying racial solidarity when a changing political economy makes it convenient to do so. That's a lesson that demagogues have learned well in much of the post-Fordist world, not least in our own neck of the woods.