Apartheid’s Wages of Whiteness

During its heyday, the apartheid state and the National Party secured enormous electoral support from South Africa’s white working class. This presentation addresses the specific benefits secured by white workers, especially Afrikaners, from the apartheid political economy. These benefits included preferential treatment in the labor market, exclusive access to a corporatist collective bargaining system, an enhanced social wage, and a privileged niche in apprenticeship, civil service, and managerial positions making increased social mobility feasible. In short, apartheid can be understood as “affirmative action for whites.”

But these wages of whiteness proved, in the end, expendable. By the late 1970s both employers and National Party politicians concluded that white workers’ privileged position in the economy was no longer sustainable; the cost of their political support had become too high. Acute shortages and high costs of skilled labor, low productivity, a saturated consumer market, and a chaotic dualism in industrial relations created a growing division between those who hoped to “reform” apartheid and the white workers who resisted such reforms.

As the presentation will show, these tensions came to a head in the late 1970s, when the Commission of Inquiry into Labour Legislation recommended an overhaul of South Africa’s industrial relations system, threatening the privileged position of white workers.