Working Class Action and Informal Trade on the Durban Docks, 1930s–1950s

Callebert, Ralph

doi:10.1080/03057070.2012.750917

Cited by 22 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…38 A Canadian-based student has recently returned to Hemson's dock workers to consider how militancy related to and spilt into petty entrepreneurship in part through illicit activity. 39…”

Section: A B O U R a N D C U Lt U R Ementioning

confidence: 99%

Labour Studies and Labour History in South Africa: Perspectives from the Apartheid Era and After

Freund¹

2013

Int Rev of Soc His

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article attempts to introduce readers to the impressive and influential historical and contemporary literature on South African labour. A literature with some earlier antecedents effectively applied classic sociological and historical themes to the specific conditions of South African political and economic development. Research on the phase of politicized and militant white worker action ties up with research into the international pre-World War I labour movement. The strength of this literature reflected the insurgent labour movement linked to political struggle against apartheid before 1990. After this review, the second half of the paper tries to consider and contextualize the challenging post-apartheid labour situation together with its political aspects. With the successful conclusion of the anti-apartheid struggle, students of the labour movement, as well as of South African society, have become more aware of the distance between establishing a liberal democracy and actually changing society itself in a direction leading towards less inequality and an improved life for those at the bottom of society, or even the broad mass of the population. As recent literature reveals, the development of post-apartheid South Africa has been a differential and problematic experience for labour.

show abstract

“…38 A Canadian-based student has recently returned to Hemson's dock workers to consider how militancy related to and spilt into petty entrepreneurship in part through illicit activity. 39…”

Section: A B O U R a N D C U Lt U R Ementioning

confidence: 99%

Labour Studies and Labour History in South Africa: Perspectives from the Apartheid Era and After

Freund¹

2013

Int Rev of Soc His

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Not only are the livelihoods of today's poor missing from the discourse, but a similar appreciation is also lacking for the multifaceted nature of livelihoods of South African workers throughout the twentieth century. My research on livelihood strategies of Durban's African dock workers in the 1950s indicates that these labourers were not ‘either’ formal sector wage labourers ‘or’ informal entrepreneurs (Callebert 2012b). There was no clear-cut distinction between the two sectors in their livelihoods.…”

Section: Questioning Dualismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transcending Dual Economies: Reflections on ‘Popular Economies in South Africa’

Callebert¹

2014

Africa

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A recent special issue ofAfricaon ‘Popular Economies in South Africa’ drew attention to local economies and to the livelihoods that link these popular, informal economies and the lives of the poor to the formal and global economies. This approach offers a promising avenue for questioning academic and policy discourses about unemployment and poverty in South Africa that are curiously reminiscent of the dualist modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s. Both the idea of a South African ‘underclass’, as discussed by Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass, and the discourse of a first and a second economy, notably promoted by former President Thabo Mbeki, assume a fundamental divide in South Africa's economy based on socio-economic exclusion. These assumptions, however, fail to capture the many ways in which people cross these divides in making a living and have problematic policy implications. Highlighting these many and complex connections, as the recent special issue did, as well as historicizing the informal economy can help us to conceptualize the South African economy as a whole rather than as existing in two separate worlds.

show abstract

“…The history of these mobilizations has been exceptionally well documented in the work of Shula Marks, 50 Dave Hemson, 51 Paul La Hausse 52 and Ralph Callebert. 53 However, one dimension that has perhaps been insufficiently emphasized in this locally-focused literature, is the way in which these political struggles were also a struggle of political imaginaries of the oceans. This period was one in which two extremely potent visions of the seas challenged that of the British Empire on a global stage.…”

Section: The Power Of White Labourismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Politics of Disembarkation: Empire, Shipping and Labor in the Port of Durban, 1897–1947

Hyslop

2018

Inter. Labor Working-Class Hist.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines the labor politics of race in Durban harbor between 1897 and 1947. It approaches the subject from an analysis of labor in a global, and particularly a British Empire, context. The article aims to move away from a solely “national” focus on the South African state and instead to look “up” toward connections to the British Empire, the world economy, and global social and political movements, and “down” towards Durban itself. These large scale (imperial and global) and small scale (city) levels were very concretely connected by Durban's role as a port. This article contends that in order to understand the place of working class Durban in an imperial world, we need to incorporate the shipping industry into other labor histories, studying how the movement of vessels and the actions of seafarers concretely linked these spatial levels. This article provides a broad overview of the sociological “shape” of the Durban working class and focuses on four “moments” of racialized labor in Durban harbor: the riot against M.K. Gandhi in 1897, the British seamen's strike of 1925, the insurgency of black dockworkers in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the conflicts over the presence of Indian seamen in the port during the Second World War. These events revolved around what is here called a politics of disembarkation, in which the joining of the ship to the world of the shore created a zone of conflict.

show abstract

Working Class Action and Informal Trade on the Durban Docks, 1930s–1950s

Cited by 22 publications

References 0 publications

Labour Studies and Labour History in South Africa: Perspectives from the Apartheid Era and After

Labour Studies and Labour History in South Africa: Perspectives from the Apartheid Era and After

Transcending Dual Economies: Reflections on ‘Popular Economies in South Africa’

The Politics of Disembarkation: Empire, Shipping and Labor in the Port of Durban, 1897–1947

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About