The 1907 strike: A reassessment
Date
1994-08-22
Authors
Shear, Keith
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Abstract
The 1907 white miners' strike on the Witwatersrand has often been used to
illustrate significant trends and changes in the political economy of early
twentieth-century South Africa. The principal themes are well-known. First,
the maintenance of production during the strike by African and Chinese
workers demonstrated that some of the skills of immigrant white miners could
be dispensed with, marking the beginning of a long struggle to remove white
underground workers from productive to mainly supervisory roles. Second,
a significant number of Afrikaners, introduced as strike-breakers, entered the
mining industry for the first time. This provided one element in a
convergence of interests between the industry and the new Het Volk
government, which, anxious to assist the Afrikaner unemployed who constituted
both a social threat and a section of its electoral support, requested Imperial
troops in support of its ‘right to work’ policy during the strike. This
indication of good faith in helping mining capital to reduce working costs
through an attack on white labour was also a signal to potential foreign
investors and lenders that the Transvaal was ‘safe for capital’; its government
had accepted the idea that in fostering the industry it was promoting the
state's major source of revenue and financial security, a goal to which any
competing social concern would henceforth be subordinated.
Despite being used to illuminate such important issues, no detailed
account of the 1907 strike has been published, while the few books and
articles that offer more than a bare outline of the chief events before
commenting on their significance are not always accurate. From this first
major conflict between capital and organized labour on the Rand a good deal
more can be learned than the bald summary of its outcome conventionally
rendered in statistics demonstrating reductions in working costs or an
increase in the percentage of locally-born whites employed. Such figures,
while doubtless important, contribute little towards an understanding of how
these results were achieved, and can be misleading if used to support far
tidier metanarratives about relations between state and capital than a detailed
discussion of the progress and resolution of the conflict would suggest. The
purpose of this paper is to offer a careful reconstruction of the strike that
will situate the course of events in the context of the production imperatives
of the mining industry; that will shed light on the coercive capacity of the
post-reconstruction state; that will illuminate the texture of white workers'
experience; that will permit a reading of the significance of the strike against
the background of the political history of the period; and that will above all
convey something of the magnitude of a conflict that has tended to be
diminished by being seen as the first and smallest of a series of increasingly
menacing challenges by white labour to the power of state and capital in early
twentieth-century South Africa.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 22 August 1994
Keywords
Strikes and lockouts. Gold mining. South Africa. Witwatersrand, Gold miners. South Africa. Witwatersrand, South Africa. Politics and government, 1836-1909