African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/7319

For information on accessing African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers collection content please contact Peter Duncan via email : peter.duncan@wits.ac.za

Browse

Filters

1989 - 198911990 - 19921

Settings

Author: search.filters.author.Duncan, David

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "We are Motor Men": Management culture and consciousness in the South African motor industry
    (1992-05-11) Duncan, David
    This paper is part of a research project on the history of the motor industry in South Africa from the 1920s to the present. The broader study looks at all aspects of the industry, from government policy, through foreign and local investment, to the organisation of production and labour relations. It takes in both the assembly sector (or, as they prefer to be called, the vehicle manufacturers) and the components sector (the parts manufacturers). Research in the social sciences has tended to be polarised between analyses of resistance against the apartheid regime and studies of the state itself. Where academic treatises have broached the topic of industry, it has been the owners of the means of production, the capitalists themselves, who have constituted the focus of attention. This essay deals mainly with the next rung in the business ladder - the senior and middle managers who actually run capitalist enterprises from year to year. It attempts a general survey of the historical development of management culture and attitudes in the motor industry. A later paper will compare and contrast these attitudes with those of shop floor workers.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    State bureaucracy and black labour in South Africa: The milling workers' strike of 1944
    (1989-07-31) Duncan, David
    In September 1944, African milling workers on the Rand, in Pretoria and in several other centres in the Transvaal, went on strike. The stoppage lasted only a few days, but it involved over 1200 hundred labourers more than half of whom mere arrested. The strike was supported by the Council for Non-European Trade Unions (CNETU), the Trades and Labour Council (TLC), the Communist Party, the Campaign for Right and Justice (CRJ), and various religious denominations. It attracted the attention of politicians at the highest level, and disrupted supplies of a basic commodity to the general public. The ending of the stoppage was confused, with compromises on both sides and appeals to official arbitration. Within four months, though, the workers were receiving a few shillings more each week in their pay packets. This study focuses on the role of the State bureaucracy before and during the milling dispute. The Department of Labour was chiefly involved in the run up to the strike and in its settlement. During the actual stoppage, the Native Affairs Department (NAD) was much to the fore, with subsidiary parts for the South African Police, the Justice Department, and the Prime Minister's office. All five had also been involved in the coal distributors' strike three months earlier, which helped to shape the tactics adopted by officials during the milling dispute.