Our precious metal

de Wilmot Godfrey James

Since the early 1970s, the South African gold-mining industry, for decades dominated by a set of fixed and unchanging features, has undergone a transformation. Above all, it is in the area of labour relations that changes have been most rapid and profound. Faced with a crisis in traditional patterns of labour recruitment, the mines have been forced to revise their sourcing and recruiting strategies and in so doing have struck at the heart of the migrant labour system. At the same time, in an attempt to contain the crisis of control, the mines have, for the first time in a hundred years, permitted trade unions to organise among workers, and in consequence the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) has emerged as a powerful force in the industry. These processes are the subject of Wilmot James's sociological and historical study of African mine workers, which provides the first major account in twenty years of labour in South Africa's gold industry. In his lucid and original analysis, based on material much of which was not previously available to researchers, Wilmot James traces the interlocking developments which have brought about a transformation in the gold industry, and relates these to wider processes of change in contemporary South African society.

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