IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/revape/v42y2015i146p508-525.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Rustenburg's labour recruitment regime: shifts and new meanings

Author

Listed:
  • Kally Forrest

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Kally Forrest, 2015. "Rustenburg's labour recruitment regime: shifts and new meanings," Review of African Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 42(146), pages 508-525, October.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:revape:v:42:y:2015:i:146:p:508-525
    DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2015.1085850
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03056244.2015.1085850
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/03056244.2015.1085850?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kate Meagher, 2022. "Crisis Narratives and the African Paradox: African Informal Economies, COVID‐19 and the Decolonization of Social Policy," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 53(6), pages 1200-1229, November.
    2. Meagher, Kate, 2022. "Crisis narratives and the African paradox: African informal economies, COVID-19 and the decolonization of social policy," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 117263, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    3. Benjamin Rubbers, 2020. "Mining Boom, Labour Market Segmentation and Social Inequality in the Congolese Copperbelt," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 51(6), pages 1555-1578, November.
    4. Coulson, Nancy, 2018. "The role of workplace health and safety representatives and the creeping responsibilisation of occupational health and safety on South African mines," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 38-48.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:revape:v:42:y:2015:i:146:p:508-525. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CREA20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.