Consenting to Labour Appropriation? The Mineworker on South African Gold and Coalmines,1951 to 2011

Introduction

We bring out certain vignettes of the life-histories of mine workers in the goldfields (Carletonville) and the coalfields (Witbank) in South Africa between 1951 and 2011. Our discussion fills up a few gaps in the existing literature dealing with the experiences of mineworkers and the ‘relations in production’. It calls for the reworking of established formulations, namely, the moral economy of the mines, the significance of re-unionization between black mineworkers, and a positive class compromise, which they struck with the management from the late 1980s to the 1990s.

Moodie (1994: 76–96, 2010a: 105) and Alexander (2003, 2005) argue that the mineworker lived through the conditions of living and work on the basis of the moral economy of the mines (MEM), which characterized the relation in production until the mid-1970s. ¹ As opposed to the description of the hapless, controlled and alienated black workers (Allen, 1991: 427, 2002: 178–179, 196; Crush et al., 1991), ² the MEM arguably embodied the consent (or acquiescence) of black (production) mineworkers. The latter used their associational power to establish the MEM, thereby securing tolerable conditions of living and social life. It meant supplies of a bare subsistence wage (especially cash savings available at the end of a contract); acceptable food (including meat and beer); acceptance of communal chieftainship for primary arbitration; weekends of communal dance, song and sport; permission for restrained protest in cases of disagreement; and the acceptance of a degree of corporal punishment.

The MEM laid down a tenuous bridge of mutual expectation and reciprocal exchanges between management and workers. When the bridge succumbed to undue pressures, exerted by either side, the social cohesion it afforded gave way. The brute reality of domination, subordination and protest resurfaced. The political authorities rushed to the rescue of the ‘internal state’ of the mines. Nonetheless, the moments of confrontation occurred along the codes of the MEM.

How was the MEM sustained? The umzi (rural homestead) orientation of black mineworkers in the Rand goldmines, as Moodie (1994: 21–32; 2010a) points out, was inter alia the basis of it. Such an orientation meant that mineworkers joined the industry for reinvesting in their rural homestead and resisting full proletarianization. By supposedly taking a cue from Moodie’s work, Phakathi (2012: 281) argues that mineworkers’ consent in the goldmines was secured through racial and coercive labour practices in the colonial and apartheid years. The day-to-day running of the production process was marked by the antagonistic and despotic relations of production. His emphasis on workers’ coercion, as compared to Moodie’s on economic incentive structure and umzi integrity of mineworkers, sets the argument apart and may make a case for forced labour, what van Onselen (1976) describes as Chibaro in Southern Rhodesian coalmines. In contrast, Alexander (2003: 64–68) suggests that the MEM hinged on the political–economic precondition, such as guaranteed markets for output and collective fixation of wages and work time in Witbank coalmines. The life-histories of our narrators indicate that the MEM as a tool of analysis does not lend us any understanding of certain facets of workers’ experience, feeling and human essence, which exceeded the MEM. The latter and its political–economic foundation were conducive to surplus extraction by eliminating the non-conformist but industrious or sick workers in the system. Instead of believing in any static and compact contours of the MEM, the life-histories prompt us to look into its process and constant renewal within it and beyond.

The crisis of the MEM struck the industry from the mid-1970s. The emergence and progress of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) further aggravated the crisis of black mineworkers’ consent in the 1980s (Moodie 1994, 2010a; Phakathi 2012). The 21-day long mines strike in 1987, following a few strikes and workplace disputes in the previous years, was the pinnacle of the crisis and an attempt at the reconstitution of the MEM. Its outcome was, argues Alexander (2012: 185), a precursor to the political settlement achieved in 1994. The development that occurred in the labour management relationship in goldmines between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s was, argues Moodie (2010a, 2010b), a positive class compromise (PCC). Moodie further stresses two points to explain the PCC: the first, the measures undertaken by the top management of the Anglo-American company initiated PCC. The second, the disciplined and self-effacing strategies and tremendous ability of Cyril Ramaphosa – first general secretary of the NUM – and his concerns for workers’ dignity and welfare propped up PCC in the late 1980s and beyond. Our discussion addresses below two silences, as we note them, in Moodie’s details: how did the rank and file of NUM figure in this scheme of PCC? What do they have to say about the content and pitfall of PCC in hindsight? The latter question would have some bearing on our grasp of the Marikana episode, which took a toll of 34 strikers at the Lonmin platinum mine in August 2012.

Here, we look at the epistemic significance of life-histories along the following lines. They offer four sets of detail on our subject: personal experiences, individual opinions and judgment, a collective oral tradition and a web of beliefs. These details find scant place in the archival and other official documents. The same could be said about of the details from oral testimonies cited in sociological works, which are usually contemporaneous, but fragmentary. We undertook three rounds of interviews for collecting the life-histories of 22 narrators between 1 June 2011 and 18 July 2012. Interviews took place at the narrators’ houses, neighbourhood shebeens (grogshops) and the NUM’s local offices (Nite and Stewart, 2012). ³ Alongside the spoken words, we engaged with the lapses, discrepancies, silences and imaginative inventions found in the memory and other oral testimony (Nite, 2014).

Mineworkers’ Sense of the Past and MEM

The sense of the past shared by mineworkers is indubitably refracted through the memory of collective struggles for liberation from apartheid, and for freedom and dignity of labour in the workplace. Mineworkers narrate the period of MEM as something connected to apartheid, white boss-ism, and un-freedom and inequality of the blacks. They state that their life was harsh and had limited opportunities for them. They battled for a modicum of control over their own life process and advancement. The memory of oppression and confrontation, as it populates the life histories, amounts to negation of any participation in the maintenance of an oppressive environment. This notwithstanding, mineworkers’ life histories are, it can be said, replete with references to the shades of a moral economy. An access to these references involves a reading of the narrators’ accounts against the grain. We take a couple of examples below.

To begin, Elsie Mkhabela’s lifespan covers the period of MEM and its moment of demise. Her grandfather was a collier who moved to Douglas colliery where he got a house in the early 1950s. Mkhabela was born in 1946 and lived in a ‘mud house’ in the Skomplaas (married quarters) of a colliery and was one of the first women to work as a cleaner in the single-sex hostel kitchen of the mines from the mid-1960s. Elsie, as a collier’s granddaughter and third generation in the coalfield would have been socialized into and been aware of how relationships between white employers and black workers played themselves out in terms of a moral–economic relationship. Poorly educated and articulating a ‘traditional’ world view, replete with overtones of ‘faith’ and hope, Mkhabela was ‘someone who loved work’ despite hostel kitchen conditions being decidedly unsanitary and the behaviour of the compounded colliery workers boorish and crude. ‘The people on the mines did not have a good life’, she said, ‘I think it was because of the employers’, a theme, explicitly couched in racial terms, to which she repeatedly turns. The poor treatment of blacks by whites, for Elsie, in turn shaped relations between black workers, ‘We didn’t get along well…. Things were not nice [but] we didn’t realize it back then that the way we were living our lives was not nice. We were living in fear [of each other]’. One of Elsie’s main concerns is that all of her family members became asthmatic, which she attributes to the mines, ‘The children would be black with dust.’ Yet after unionization – from 1989 – she says, ‘We witnessed a difference in the span of our lives… People began to respect each other… We felt that we did our job well’. There were significant changes in terms of salaries and benefits. Democracy made her ‘feel free’ and she openly admits that her support of nationalization of the mines might be due to her lack of education. ⁴ Unionization of the collieries and democracy changed Elsie’s life and her view of it, and opened up a social contract any semblance of which had clearly been completely absent throughout her life in the collieries.

The scathing critiques of ‘the old days’ that she weaves into her autobiography is itself couched in a candid language to suggest that the same attitude and opinion was not alive nor at work ‘back then’ – the era of MEM. This is a point, it can be said, of the absence of negation, that by inversion would mean the existence of a tolerable condition of social life and work. The point once again surfaces in another forthright account from Elsie’s daughter, Juliet Mkhabela. Juliet was born in 1971 and grew up in the colliery with her mother and father, who also worked in the colliery. She went to primary school in the mine and finished secondary school as a matriculate. Juliet recalls that, ‘After standard ten (matric), usually our working father would go to the mines and ask if they could employ children. Depending on luck, children would get a particular type of job and work’. She was not the only informant to refer to mineworkers securing employment for kith and kin. Can this, occurring in the early 1980s, be said to be an element of the old moral economy? Juliet was lucky and now works in the Human Resources (HR) department in a colliery close to where she was born, but only because her father was retrenched and had ‘already used his last money to pay for my college fees’, which ‘forced me to look for work immediately’.

Unlike her mother, Juliet grew up with ‘electricity and flushing toilets’, but no electric stoves as the colliers’ families just ‘took coal’ in order to cook. Life was ‘normal’, but not ‘wonderful’ in one of the 53 houses in the ‘black men-headed married quarters’, she recalls. Her strict father did not permit her ‘to go with friends to the hostels to see traditional dances’. Neither did she mix with anyone from either the ‘white married quarters and white single quarters’, even though ‘it was close by’. Like her mother, Juliet also started out as a cleaner and did ‘heavy duties’, and similarly reports that she was treated ‘badly by men’ in 2003, but was elected as an NUM shaft steward from 2004 to 2005. She worked long shifts, which severely impacted her family life. The benefits that unionization ushered in (improved safety, four months of maternity leave, proper Unemployment Insurance Fund registration, and paid funeral arrangements) and its impact, she said, made a ‘very, very, very big difference in our lives’. On the other hand, changes in the mine regarding gender relations have been minimal. She finds herself, her NUM membership and stewardship notwithstanding, up against in particular the ‘numbers of old uneducated people’ who are ‘stubborn’ and ‘we (in the HR office) do not see eye-to-eye with workers… The majority are in the age group to have worked for 26 to 30 years. They expect us to let them do as they want and not as per company rules and regulations’. Juliet can talk knowledgeably about different styles of management and feels a certain difficulty with those people who come into the industry ‘who have no history in the mines’. ⁵

In the following brief comparison, quite astonishing instances of the extent of social continuity are manifested, even though the explanations for the same kinds of events were couched in different terms, yet in much the same register, across two generations. Alfred Jozine, who was born in 1935 and worked for Anglo American for 40 years until 1999, and Patrick Austin Mphandwe, who was born in 1981 and started work as contract labourer in 1997. Jozine stoically ‘got used’ to the mines and did not ‘blame the mine’ even when he was injured. ⁶ This appears to be evidence of acceptance of the old moral economy. Instead of being unemployed, Mphandwe similarly thought it was better to ‘go work in the Camp’ and said, ‘I told myself that I am a man’ and ‘gave myself a little courage’, even though he had heard that ‘people die in the mine and a lot of other things’. ⁷ In moral economic terms, nothing appears to have changed, the differences in their ages and the advent of political enfranchisement and unionization notwithstanding.

After rocks collapsed in a ‘fall of ground’, Jozine’s compatriots ran around looking for ‘the ghost’, while Mphandwe explains that ‘the mine has no brain’. Jozine says his compatriots used muthi (traditional protective medicines) and conducted the rite of lamb sacrifice, but that he went to church and ‘kept the Bible and hymn books next to our bed’; while Mphandwe ‘told myself God is with me in the mine’. In the midst of persistence of workplace risk, while there is a shift in explanation across the generations, there is a sharing of attitudes to the world of work in the mines. This is not to say that the similarities do not express themselves differently. The only contact Jozine initially had with a woman was to communicate by writing letters to his wife, but later ‘found a girlfriend in Bekkersdal’. Mphandwe, on the other hand, reports of a woman at work and admits to not being married, but has five children and maintains ‘two families’.

Some statements of the older narrators, to the effect that they did not realize it back then that the way they were living their lives was difficult and that they got used to the labour regime, confirm in a way the historicity of MEM. Below, our discussion moves on to other elements of life-histories that do not fit neatly within the contours of MEM.

Fragility of the MEM

Where Moodie expected to find a workforce in the mines ‘ground into submission’ and found instead ‘a vibrant moral economy’ (Moodie, 2012, 1994: 82–83), we expected to find evidence of the integrities of the old moral economy among older workers. We were disappointed, which made us reconsider the extent to which this view had dominated our understanding of the texture of work and life on the mines. The life-histories, it could be said, were not readily illuminated by the use of the concept of the moral economy as a tool of analysis. On the contrary, our informants did not present testimonial data providing us with the evidence we expected, despite having had the notion of the moral economy as our key conceptual lens. The concept simply did not appreciably advance our understanding of the experiences and activities of mineworkers that were reported to us. Consider some instances. Supervisory violence, suggests Moodie (1994), dwindled in the goldmines from 1950 onwards, as the code of conduct was routinized and the workforce became stabilized. Alexander (2003) points out that the same occurred at the collieries from the 1940s.

Violent treatment by a member of authority, spanning from the compound police, hostel chief (indunas), and team leaders to ordinary white persons in the mining areas, was reported to have been imminent in everyday lives of many informants. Varieties of abusive treatment, including kaffir as slang frequently hurled at workers and threat of dismissal over legitimate defiance further blemished the old list. Moses Xaba reports that:

Sometimes, I went outside of nkomponi [the compound hostel] to the nearby shops for enjoyable food and beer on Sundays. A white staff called me to carry garbage and dirt and to dump it at a certain place. I did not receive any payment for such labour. I bore the most arduous work underground because I consistently declined the demand of my boss boy [team leader] to become a Nyatsi [mine girlfriend]. ⁸

In the end, he preferred to quit the job in order to maintain a dignified manhood, which he desired despite financial hardship.

Unlike Xaba, Sechaba Matiase Ezekiel, a weighbridge man at a coalmine, forbore quitting the job. However, he bore the marks of corporal punishment. He reports, ‘When we missed work, management took us to a room under the running water. We stood there the whole night. Normally, such punishment was for two days. We had boots but no gloves, ear plugs and glasses. We did everything with our own hands. Naturally, I fell sick, the management made me to drink something to see whether I was really sick for real.’ ⁹

Workers’ critiques of rough work relationships acquired words in their folksongs. Phillimon Motswere reports that they used to sing a song underground to vent their feelings and ‘to motivate one another’:

Abelungu ba sibiza vho dom

Hebelungu ya sibiza vho dom

Abelungu go down

Abelungu go down

Vha sibiza vho dom.

[The whites say we are dom (Afrikaans: stupid/dull). The whites say we are dom. The whites must go down. The whites must go down. They say we are dom.] ¹⁰

Here, the black mineworkers grumbled against the absence of reciprocity and mutuality between the two sides of the MEM.

Nyatsi, prostitution, irregular cohabitation and Famu (mine dance) formed the cultural patterns of life in the single-sex hostel and within work contracts that were bereft of any provision for family leave for six months or one year to eighteen months, depending on the territorial background of workers. The worker from Lesotho orchestrated Famu song and dance at the weekends at hostels. Matiase reminiscences, ‘When we sang “helele mane hehe helelele mane”, we took off our clothes; sang and danced. The song demanded showing of our body figure to other men. The youngster did it in a group. The older ones would get inside and be hit by the young ones. It was the game to wear off the stress.’

Workers frequently expressed the feeling of being sexually estranged and their manhood challenged. The young Lesotho brigade to whom Matiase belonged sang about not getting married.

Tebogo haye haye wee tebogo

[When will you get married?]

haye haye

[No you cannot! No you cannot!]

Wee tebogo haye haye

[When will you get married? No! No!]

Matiase and his workmates teased each other over the anxiety of delayed marriages and the nyatsi relationships between young boys and older mining men. Luke Mathebula, a laisher (shoveller) and first-aid person, sang a ntlamo (mining song) in the weekly mtshongolo (Zulu dance) to express his anxiety about irregular family life:

ithi wazingeleza umuzi wenye indoda, owakho wawu shiya nobani, we madala, wazingeleza umuzi wenye indoda owakhho wawushiya nobani, we madala.

[While you are going around in another man’s house, hey old man, who is left with our wife back home, hey old men.] ¹¹

‘We sang it,’ Mathebula continues, ‘because it was very hard then. We worked here and left our family behind in the homeland. We thought that while we were here for a whole year, our wife might have been usurped by the person who did not work. It made our hearts sore. The things were getting messy back home because we did not regularly go there in our attempt to finish the Join [contract].’

These folksongs were motivational songs conveying the migrant men’s denouncement of the existing situation. Matiase reports that the employer opined that ‘when a man does not sleep with a woman, he becomes stronger’. Employers did not allow mineworkers to go home during the period of ‘join’ (work contract of twelve to eighteen months). If someone slept outside, the management asked him, ‘where were you, give an explanation?’ He says, ‘We taught ourselves to accept the life the way it was. When the nature of a man came into life, certain behaviour [is] discordantly manifested.’ Matiase continues:

I have kids who have their own children now. They saw me only for a very short period of time. I have not seen the woman I married to an extent that I don’t really know her or she knows me. If this company closes and I lose [my] job, we will know that whether we have married the right person or not. When I told the management ‘one of my children is sick,’ they replied, ‘You are not a doctor. What are you going to do over there?’ I used to get permission to visit home only in November. That was the time when I went to make a child. That is why our children in most cases shared the same months of birth. One can calculate the months from the time we were at home and see what is wrong with birthdays. It badly affected our conjugal relationship. Therefore, we fought under the banner of NUM for the rights of my family and leaves for sickness or funeral in order to be with my family during difficult times. Previously, when I got a telegram from Soweto, management wanted a letter from the Teba [The Employment Bureau of Africa – the recruiting institution of the mines] and did not allow us [to] visit a sick relative. You see, it was just slavery… Some would flee. I used to wait for nine months while I was just writing letters to my wife and children saying ‘I love you; you know how much I love you.’ I would write about four papers, telling them how I felt… At the end of the day we were human being, we had feelings. We longed for our wife and children. One was lucky if he worked with a neighbour from home. He gave him something to take home if he was on leave.

Persons like Matiase thus deprecated the conditions of living and social life that were tortuous and had roots in the single-sex hostel and work contracts that were devoid of family leave. They questioned the coercive behaviour of management.

One may read this narrative as a posterior articulation of some politically initiated informants, as they were, from 2011 to 2012. Such a reading, nonetheless, may find it hard to dismiss the folksongs that workers composed and danced to in the heydays of the MEM, and other letters that Matiase wrote. ¹² These cultural artefacts represent an element of the ‘getting used to’ manner of adjustment with the mining areas. These would imply that workers were anything but acutely alienated and they borrowed from the rural cultural resources in attempting to adapt to the new situation. Moodie (2010a: 105) argues that the existence of moral economy permitted workers an adherence to the rural values and rural subsistence economy rather than wage increases per se. Not surprisingly, the facets of workers’ everyday feeling, experience and humanity that the life-histories above lay bare appear to have seriously interrogated the claim of labour-management relationship in the shape of the MEM.

The moot question before us, therefore, is: how was the moral economic relationship, identified by Moodie and Alexander, sustained? This relationship was conducive to surplus extraction and renewed itself, oral testimonies show, by removing the non-conformist but industrious persons, like Xaba, out of the system and disciplining the rest. It also meant the denial of any opportunity to the black workers for a fuller, human life; and was causative of morbid sexual and emotional ways of life. These men, who spent a long time establishing such moral economy, suggestively, taught themselves following incident after incident how to refashion a truncated socio-cultural life, known as the mining social/culture, within the limits of the MEM. Opposed to the static and compact contours of the MEM, the life histories highlight its fragile terrain, which failed to gain the consent of many workers within and beyond it.

Re-unionization and a Positive Class Compromise

Given that the memory of the African Mineworkers Union (AMWU) was buried in the past of a generation before, it was a momentous step when mineworkers formed the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in December 1982. ¹³ The biographical accounts reflect the enthusiasm and seriousness with which the initial clandestine forms of organization began in 1977. Threats of dismissal were made. The indunas (hostel compound tribal chiefs) were watchful of gatherings of workers. There is little doubt that the re-unionization of black mineworkers heralded a fight for the liberation of the workplace and participative management. For the NUM leadership, of course, this was at the same time a fight for national liberation. For the militants in the NUM it strongly appears that economic independence was intimately linked to political freedom.

In the early 1980s, the NUM was, recalls John Masilela, the first mass front mobilized to advance the political battle cry, ‘Viva ANC Viva!’ ¹⁴ This claim of being ‘the first mass front’ might, however, be attributed to the South African Allied Workers’ Union (SAAWU) in the Eastern Cape. The strikes at the mines that followed were a natural corollary, buoyed by the prospect of achieving a broader political goal. The path of national democratic revolution in the 1990s, including the spectacular moments of the release of Nelson Mandela and others in 1990 and the first opportunity to vote in April 1994, were reported to have been the necessary political preconditions for the consolidation of the material effects that NUM came to exercise. Cecilia Mohloua informs us that the union only acquired an effective degree of power to change things in the 1990s. She does, however, attribute her own salary increase and being able to take a Sunday off to the mineworkers’ strike of 1987. ¹⁵ What she suggests here, contrary to Alexander (2012: 185), is that the outcome of the great 1987 mines strike might not have been a precursor to the political settlement achieved in 1994. Indeed, the ability to draw a correct lesson by a few top managers and the NUM leaders had an important bearing on future developments (Moodie 2010b, 2013).

The discussion below throws light on the way that the rank and file of the NUM figured in what Moodie describes as the PCC, and what they report to us on the contents and pitfalls of PCC. Mining workers adopted the umbrella of the NUM due to both ideological persuasion and raw coercion. Many clearly felt the urge for economic and political betterment. Managerial despotism shared the same ground as the racial regime of white domination; in particular this was powerfully felt in the below underground workplaces by many of our informants, who were subject to all white supervisory and manaerial personnel. Such racial domination expressed itself in the limited opportunities of the advancement for black workers and the readiness with which dismissal for insignificant offences could be meted out. The new generation of radical youth of the 1970s, Mathebula and Masilela recall, found themselves too vulnerable to compromise. Nor were they any more prepared to passively watch while their white colleagues enjoyed the benefits of a diametrically opposed lifestyle. This was the radical expression of an urban proletariat in contrast to umzi-orientated migrant labourers, who sought a living wage for their families. The new and younger generation was politically informed and bent on establishing comparable individual self-respect and broader social liberation.

Masilela says he wanted his siblings to have the same educational opportunities as the families of white mining staff. The personal cost had been high. He delayed his marriage for 12 years – between 1976 and 1988 – in order to support his four siblings at school. A familist (family-building) movement for social and intellectual uplift appears to have been occurring in the mining community. It motivated their political enthusiasm. ¹⁶ Over and above this, while working as a shaft steward at the Douglas colliery, he had managed to send (via the NUM), he tells us, three black colleagues to Cuba to study mining engineering from 1987 to 1989. This was where workers had taken matters into their own hands, with Masilela reporting that the union created an armed brigade of young workers at Douglas colliery in the years 1983 to 1989. It also included Sechaba Matiase from Lesotho. They wielded a sjambok (whip) during their parades to secure control inside mine hostels during the strikes in 1984. This was understood and exercised as a form of counter-power in the face of challenges from the hostel police and indunas. This was deemed a necessary tactic in the presence of a range of cleavages that divided mining communities. Such cleavages ran along the lines of generation, ideological orientation, geo-political affinity and the ways in which labour was controlled.

The umzi tradition informed the opinion of many of the older workers. They had become habituated to and continued to appreciate supplies of rationed food, cheap beer and the rent-free accommodation that the mines provided. They had grown used to, Alfred Jozine acknowledges, the racialized authoritarian character of workplace relations. They wanted concrete assurances and clarification over the possible gains that would result from this new struggle. Some were uncomfortable with the political tone and affiliation of the NUM. It appears that a good number of mineworkers from Lesotho and Mozambique held the view that their nations already enjoyed political freedom (Nite and Stewart, 2012: Matiase’s and Jozine’s accounts). There was, in addition, a controversy and debate around ‘free homelands’ versus the ANC’s national objective. A long-standing loyalty to indunas was a further factor with which the new militant generation had to contend. These issues were to result in intense conflict in the mines, coming to a head both during and after the 1987 mineworkers’ strike.

The liminality of millenarian ungovernability, which Bozzoli (2004) notices among the Township youth, did not seem to guide exercises of raw coercion by our narrators; nor did they intend to achieve it in the mines. Masilela recalls, ‘many strikers went home during the 21-day long 1987 strike.’ He used to inform them by telephone about the progress of the strike. Upon the conclusion of the strike, he sent them messages to come back to rejoin work. At the Douglas colliery, he negotiated with the management to accept ‘rejoining’ of these colleagues over a week after the strike came to an end. However, some workers delayed and lost their jobs.

Moodie has described the conflict of perceptions between those mobilizing for unionization, on the one hand, and the traditional, generally older workers, on the other. The latter enjoyed the favour of management in the early days. Later, the management, not without their own internal conflicts, initiated a reconciliation with the NUM in order to contain violence and the interruption of production resulting from the factional fights and brawls between black workers and white supervisors. This was the PCC, Moodie (2010a, 2010b) argues, and which our evidence suggests generally enjoyed the support of the rank and file. Our respondents came to appreciate, certainly later, the gains secured from the compromise, such as the granting of living-out allowances, the establishment of a provident fund, medical aid and pension, and paid maternity, sickness and family leave. None of them vented any instances of complaint against why the NUM has been recessive towards the demand for nationalization!

Benefits of Unionization: A Paradox of PCC

The informants relate variedly to these changes. Jozine appreciates the abolition of pass laws in 1986, the provisioning of the ‘blue card’ (unemployment benefits card) and acknowledges that it was the union, of which he was a member from about 1989, that helped him to secure visiting permits for his family members and gain access to family accommodation for them during their visits to the mines.

The significance of unionization for Elsie Mkhabela was the right of refusal: in other words, the right to say that following certain instructions was not part of her job description. Linked to this, it was the recognition of self-respect and a measure of control over the matters of work and life that were of crucial importance. For example, Mazibuko relates:

Let me say that there were changes the union effected. White people, who despised us people of black skins, realized that ‘these people also think, he is not a baboon as he has got a brain.’ Now they listened when we raised any matter. Previously, they did and uttered whatever they wanted. With the union, we had the right to be treated like people and to be heard. Even if something was being done we could now suggest that we think this can be done this way. In a way we asked for a change and it would take place after talks. Before that it was Boss and Mrs. We didn’t have a say. Even in the nursing field where we had to work together, a superiority complex influenced whites. They have it even now, but they don’t show it the way they used to before the unions. ¹⁷

There is little doubt that the worst forms of despotic and uncaring practices were swept away with the advent of unionization, even though these may have taken some time in coming into effect. The occupational career of Masilela exemplified it. He was among the first black mineworkers to have benefitted from the removal of restriction over black artisanship in the mining industry, which came to him as a result of the recommendation of the Wiehahn commission from 1979 to 1981.

I was lucky to be selected to attend the coal preparation course at the Colliery Branwood College. The plant manager, Ivor Duprée decided to send me to the college. I passed the course, obtained the certificate and came to back to my old job. I did not use that certificate and remained a weighbridge man until the dismantling of apartheid in 1988, for it was the white man’s job. White guys used to say that you can have the certificate but you are not going to use it anyway. (Nite and Stewart, 2012: Massilela’s account)

The effect of the 1987 mines strike initiated the end of job reservation and a window of new opportunity for Masilela.

Previously, migrant workers, returning to serve out a new labour contract, would not have been re-employed if they were found to be suffering from tuberculosis or lung disease. ¹⁸ While the practice of ‘medical boarding’ remains a complaint still heard in the mines today, the system has been stripped of its worst abuses. Phillimon Motswere still coughs and his claims for compensation were not successful; this notwithstanding, he did not lose employment and received medical care at the mine hospital under the new dispensation. ‘Management makes sure,’ Martha Maseko reports, ‘that a person quitting a mine job is now subject to an exit medical examination so as to prevent any claims for occupational diseases in the future.’ ¹⁹ The rationale for this, namely to prevent compensation claims against the industry, is by the way and merely reflects the changing balance of forces between social classes.

It is perhaps only by having employed a life-history method that the overall extent to which mineworkers felt, and gave evidence of, significantly improved lives could have been established. Siphiwe Litchfield’s father managed to support her during her diploma in ceramics technology and electrical science. ²⁰ Martha Maseko concerns herself with how to plan for the university education of her children. John Booi successfully completed his boilermaker’s certification. ²¹ While Juliet Mkhabela discontinued her university education after the retrenchment of her father from the coalmine in 1993, she is currently pursuing a certificate course in Human Resources. Many have an eye on the bursary scheme that many mines now offer for themselves and for their children.

The women certainly grabbed the new opportunities now available to establish a greater degree of personal independence. That the mines have since 2002 been required to reserve 10 percent of employment opportunities for black women is attributed to the NUM in these life histories (Nite and Stewart, 2012: Juliet’s, Siphiwe’s and Maseko’s accounts). Whatever the actual origin of this policy, it is aimed at two ends. The mines should become a wherewithal for skill formation among black women, and there should be a degree of parity between the employment of white women, previously employed in the mine offices, and black women. The social dividend of this policy is clearly manifest in the life of Juliet Mkhabela who says, ‘There is nothing to stop me now.’ This represents positive hope for the future.

While widely welcomed, these changes have not gone far enough for many. For Jozine, workers are still tormented, unsafe and bear the brunt of a lack of care regarding health risks. Certainly, racial discrimination has not suddenly been completely eliminated. This continues as when, for example, Vukile Booi was denied training on the grounds of race. He fought the matter and, as his account shows, managed to win the day. He has been a boilermaker artisan since 1997 and, as the only black artisan, continued to fight against more subtle forms of racial discrimination in his new workplace, and was dismissed again in 1999 for his pains. His case took two years in the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA). He says, ‘I won it. I came back victorious to the mine. Today, I am a shaft steward.’

If Moodie is correct that the resolution to the significant violent confrontations in the mines in the 1980s lay with a compromise between contending classes, then one would expect new institutional responses to claw back the considerable costs incurred in granting concessions to organized black labour as manifested in their improved conditions of life. The new systems of collective bargaining in a multiracial democracy, institutionalized by the Labour Relations Act 1995, required that adjustments and new ways of ensuring continued profitability be found. Employers, consequently, adopted three-fold measures to protect returns to the shareholders. Since 1997 they have extended the benefits of production bonuses, previously available only to supervisory staff and team leaders until the 1980s, to crewmen. The evidence of the mine overseer, Anton Vosloo, concurs with these dates. ²² In some mines this bonus comes into effect only if output exceeds the established monthly target laid down for the crew. Under the zama zama (overtime) shift arrangement some mineworkers are engaged in production over weekends and earn production bonuses rather than being paid at normal overtime rates. Some workers like this arrangement; while the NUM has been known to resist calls for zama zama shifts. For the management, it guarantees returns without higher labour costs, which have been ballooning as a result of new social wages. At times, for instance, crewmen have secured greater earnings from these production bonuses than from their basic monthly salaries. At the same time, the rush for production, which this system encourages, compromises safety. This situation embodies what Phakathi (2012: 289) calls a new or ‘soft touch’ form of worker coercion due to the malign effects of the new production system.

Further, after 1987 the industry once again increased the recruitment of non-South African labour, not least to attenuate the presence of the new generation of highly politicized local labour. The attempt was short-lived and appears to have petered out since 1994 with the dawn of a democratic South Africa. It could be said, however, that the industry managed to devise a way around the problems that its recalcitrant workforce caused it. This was to turn to subcontracted labour and has been well documented (Bezuidenhout 2006; Bezuidenhout and Kenny, 1999; Crush et al., 2001). Labour contractors increasingly supply, control and manage the labour force. London Mkhomqo, a miner and shaft steward, informs us that in the company for which he works (Xstrata), contract labour formed nearly 40 percent of the total workforce in the south Witbank coal mines in 2011. ²³ These are regular workers, but are classified as temporary. Subcontracted labour does not qualify for social insurance benefits, such as paid leave, and their hours are known to be notoriously long and unrecorded. While the NUM has long believed in organizing this ‘underclass’ of labourers, not least to prevent further segmentation of the labour market, it has had few successes on this front and has taken it up as a national political issue, tells Mkhomqo. We are yet not sure of any effect of his statement.

For these subcontracted mineworkers, the PCC turned out to be a source of their problems. In the early 1990s, scholars like Crush et al. (1991: 210–211) and Whiteside (1993) have underscored the tendency of emergence of a corporatist model – the tripartite rule of big government, big business and big unions – of the labour–management relationship in the mining industry. Under this labour regime, they conjectured, black miners could become privileged elite, protected by a closed shop union. The subsequent decades witnessed history partially unfolding along the lines of their conjecture. Management successfully created the subcontracted labour as an underclass, which has gradually been whittling away the weight of the so-called ‘privileged elite.’ An answer to this political economic challenge does not straightforwardly invoke the demand for nationalization between our informants.

Our informants express a remarkably grounded set of opinions about nationalization of the mines, including ones fraught with ambiguity. ‘In the hands of government,’ Mkhomqo opines, ‘the mines may not turn out further safer than what it is at present. Currently, the mines are bound to follow the sound safety rules laid down by government.’ Similarly, ‘workers may not receive a better economic deal than what is presently available to us, because government already refuses to offer any substantially improved deal to its own employees. Indeed, the government administrator sucks out their own employer (i.e. government), which will indubitably cause bankruptcy in case of industrial management,’ argues Booi.

The mining companies transfer certain revenues to community-help programmes, like schools, computer training and other skill-building centres, clinics and parks in the (black) community. The mining regime grounds itself in such community-helping programmes. The latter represents a modus vivendi, which capital and democratic government have arrived at under the paradigm of corporate social responsibility. ‘Employers should first fulfil the demand of employees before transferring of revenue to other charity work,’ opines Litchfield. The employees should have free access to these social services financially supported by mining companies in the community, says Booi. These testimonies, it could be said, allude to the fact that a utilitarian imagination of social change has become the ideological foundation of the contemporary labour regime. This is little to serve the demand for nationalization that would transfer industrial surplus for redistributive justice between the non-mining populations.

Conclusions

The argument of the moral economy of mines claims to illuminate the consent and the function of associational power of the mineworkers, as it was the real foundation of social exchanges between management and black mineworkers. The life histories bring out how the moral economy was fragile and as a tool of analysis hindered a clear understanding of the facets of workers’ experience, feeling and human essence. Mineworkers questioned the coercive behaviour of supervisors and the dangerous conditions of their workplaces. They deprecated their deficient sexual life, which was tortuous and had roots in the single-sex hostel and work contracts devoid of family leave. The moral economy of the mines inter alia involved the elimination of non-conformist but industrious persons out of the system (contra Alexander 2003). It also meant the denial of any opportunity for a fuller human life; and was causative of morbid sexual and emotional ways of life.

The life histories further shows how the rank and file generally endorsed and participated in what Moodie depicts as a positive class compromise struck between management and the workers’ union in the 1980s to 1990s. Mineworkers found themselves justified for investing in national democratic revolution, which they saw as a necessary precondition for the consolidation of union effects in the 1990s. The combined effects of economic and political struggles brought to them a series of modifications in the labour regime with a view to gaining a regular family life and advancing humanity. This notwithstanding, we find our informants sharing varied opinions over the transformation seen in the last three decades. Depending on their personal experiences, the transformation was celebratory and truncated. For black mineworkers, the norm of exclusion gave way to that of discrimination between, and differentiation of, labourers. It engendered the spirit of a new range of fights to secure opportunities. Management effectively replaced white boss-ism by economism and a corporatist model of labour management relationship.