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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.
