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| Edward Cottle |
A strike is a ‘social phenomenon of enormous complexity which, in its totality, is never susceptible to complete description, let alone complete explanation’ (Gouldner, 1954:65). The complexity of the meaning and implications of strikes often comes to the fore when offensive strikes – strikes where workers demand more than what they have in terms of wages and working conditions – force the attention of the state, capitalists and civil society. They lead to a varied interpretation not only of how events unfolded but also the impact they have made.
Strikes are a key manifestation of the class struggle over the distribution of national income and reform of the labour relations system. Offensive strikes can generate an extraordinary amount of pressure on the social system which often leads to structural changes such as the reconfiguring of the industrial relations system, the economy or the political system. Such events are referred to here as a turning point ( Legassick, 2012; Alexander, 2013; Webster, 2016).
Strikes in post-apartheid South Africa
In the immediate post-apartheid period, the trend was for strikes to increase in frequency, with the highest number of strikes in South African history – 1 324 strikes – taking place in 1998. From 2000 and 2009, however, strikes averaged 71 per annum, which was even lower than the 1960s, and these strikes were largely defensive in character.
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| Sizwe Timothy Phakathi |
Worker agency – the idea that workers are active, creative and resilient reactors to capitalist and managerially defined work structures – is a fundamental part of the sociology of work and organisational psychology. Labour process studies have shown the significance of individual and collective human agency in capitalist production systems. The ability of workers to socially organise work in ways that make sense to them long manifested itself during the scientific management movement despite Taylorism’s failure to recognise the worker as a significant social actor within the workplace – the notion that was reasserted by the human relations movement theory.
Worker agency proved instrumental for workers in fighting racially repressive labour practices in colonial and apartheid mining workplace regimes. The agency of underground workers to resist the despotic management system was a boon to the formation of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in the 1980s. In reflecting on the views of the NUM rank-and-file members solicited in a South African gold mine long before the eruption of the Marikana tragedy, this article seeks to pose a question: if workers can exercise their agency to restrict or expand output at the point of production, can they use their agency to withdraw or extend their union membership? The article seeks to highlight that membership-leadership conflict within the NUM was brewing in the gold mines long before the Marikana tragedy in the Rustenburg platinum belt.
