The onset and maintenance of apartheid involved the taming of white labor unions and the convincing of members that their interests lay with rigid segregation and protection of their jobs. When black resistance and globalizing economic pressures eroded the alliance of dominant white social strata, neither the racial state nor capitalism had use for such social engineering. Historically, only black workers undertook laboring, and as they increasingly moved into semi-skilled occupations, historians who had given considerable attention to pre–World War II white laborers and their contradictory militancy, were now inclined to neglect them. Scholars began to view white workers as largely supervisors—notably, those in the Mine Workers’ Union (mwu), which has, however, since the 1994 demise of apartheid, recast itself as the ethnic- and broad-based Solidarity Movement.

Van Zyl-Hermann—deftly combining sources across the disciplines of history, politics, economics, and labor studies—revises the periodization of the late apartheid era...

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