How employers ensure access to cheap labour in different political and labour market contexts

What is it about?

There has been much scholarship about how employers create and perpetuate inequality by skewing the employment relationship to their favour. But our understanding of this is often quite abstract, so it helps to look in some detail at the actual practices of employers, especially when political circumstances shift in ways that ought to benefit workers. To do so, we studied the practices of employers over a 140 year period in the South African mining sector. We found that in the early years, employers ensured access to cheap labour through "forcing" practices to enrol workers into a highly controlled migrant labour system. Then, during the transition to democracy in 1994, there was a significant shift toward "freeing" practices that apparently benefited workers, but which actually further entrenched employers' advantages because of the changing dynamics in the labour market.

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Why is it important?

The study shows how changes that ostensibly seem beneficial to vulnerable people may in fact further entrench their disadvantage. Every social intervention may have negative unintended consequences, and it is often in the interest of powerful actors to pay little attention to them. Knowing this, we ought to give more careful attention to concealed interests and to unintended consequences.

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