| Gendering Production in Wartime South Africa | The American Historical Review, 106.4

Gendering Production in Wartime South Africa

NANCY L. CLARK

"To say that the Second World War was important is to make the last uncontroversial statement in African Studies." These words opened a volume on Africa and the Second World War several years ago. The editors went on to suggest that such accord arose because "Everyone knows that it was either the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end of European colonialism in Africa." Indeed, by the end of World War II, the European colonial powers were exhausted by the second maelstrom to hit their continent in the twentieth century and soon determined that direct rule over African territories could not be sustained. Within fifteen years, most of the African continent was on the road to independent political rule. Historians and other scholars, however, have not looked very closely at the wartime experiences that brought about such momentous change. According to the editors of Africa and the Second World War, most historians refer to the conflict as "an almost incantatory invocation," a sort of empty historical marker, assuming the "immense significance" of the event but not examining it as a period in history or paying any attention to its complexities.¹ While historians agree that there must be a relationship between the war and subsequent African independence, our understanding of such a connection remains paradoxically both emphatic and amorphous. 1

     More recently, Frederick Cooper has addressed this lacuna in analysis, drawing our attention to the fundamental importance of the war in shaking "old structures of power and habits of discourse" and causing British and French colonial authorities to change their "entire approach" to "the labor question" in their African colonies. During and after the war, officials pondered "the reshaping of a political framework in which a social question is debated." The political framework was colonialism. The social question was labor control over African colonial subjects. As Cooper demonstrates, the political framework was shaken by African laborers who challenged the outright and brutal repression exercised by their colonial employers. Massive labor strikes during and immediately after the war threatened to bring production to a standstill throughout both British and French colonies. As the war drew to a close, colonial policies gradually changed in the hopes of turning unruly workers into a stabilized work force. Colonial administrators throughout Africa began to accept their subjects as urban dwellers and industrial workers, "incorporating" them into local political structures instead of treating them as minors without rights, and they allowed union representation and bargaining in industrial affairs. Such a shift in policy had enormous political consequences, leading to a proliferation of African political organizations and the representation of African workers. Cooper's analysis has gone a long way toward helping us understand how and why the war had such "immense significance" for African history.² 2

     The dramatic exception to this pattern, or as Cooper puts matters, "the obvious contrast," is South Africa. South Africa became more repressive in the postwar period than any of the colonial territories, despite economic and social wartime upheaval as significant as anywhere else on the continent. There, the impact of war appeared as profound as in the rest of Africa. Societies were mobilized. Structures of production changed. African workers disputed their appalling conditions of labor in strikes that threatened the country's economy as seriously as did those taking place in Kenya and Senegal and Ghana and the Ivory Coast at much the same time. Yet, rather than try to placate the workers, the white rulers of South Africa chose to intensify the repression of African labor. As Cooper has described, the South African government "made determined use of police power to reinvigorate the migratory system and to expel massive numbers of city dwellers to rural areas and to a life deemed to be 'African.'" Adopting and refining the tools of the most despotic labor regimes through a combination of economic and political repression, the South African government chose to turn back the hands of time with force and attempt to make Africans temporary members of South African industry and society.³ 3

     The differences in labor policy between South Africa and colonial Africa are clear. What is less so are the reasons why. Cooper states that the "divergence . . . appears as a direct consequence of the South African electorate's decision to embrace apartheid, with its notion of separateness, and reject stabilization."⁴ Three years after the end of the war, in 1948, the Nationalist Party won the whites-only election on a political platform called "apartheid," or apartness. Although initially somewhat vague in conception, apartheid was intended to further disadvantage Africans, and it ultimately became an international symbol of the most regressive racism of the twentieth century. Among other fully institutionalized forms of racism, apartheid labor policies initiated in the 1950s and 1960s included job reservation for whites and a prohibition on labor representation for Africans. South Africa's "divergent" path can certainly be signposted by the institution of apartheid. But what caused this divergence, why this difference in labor policy, why this decision by the electorate? 4

     The reasons for the establishment of apartheid have been debated by scholars for years. Usually, the answers have been presented in more or less ethnic terms. Afrikaners mobilized as a group (the reasons for this have ranged from frontier racism to religious fervor to the aspirations of a petit bourgeoisie) and, in an election in 1948, took control of the state in order to benefit themselves at the expense of the African population of South Africa.⁵ Yet, if this is so, why and, more important, how were these goals only realized in 1948 despite nearly fifty years of Afrikaner participation in a white-ruled South African state? What changed during the years immediately preceding 1948, the war years? 5

     One approach to begin to unravel the complex effects of World War II on South Africa and the subsequent emergence of the devastating policies of apartheid is to examine closely labor relations during the war in much the same way that Cooper analyzed the rest of the continent to explain decolonization. As Cooper demonstrated, ongoing labor struggles throughout the war threatened the economic profitability of the colonies as well as the political control of the metropolitan powers, causing colonial administrators to try to defuse labor discontent by incorporating Africans into the political process. How did white South African officials react to such labor struggles? South Africa, like the African colonies, relied primarily on African labor performed under repressive conditions. The South African mining industry had always been the country's largest employer and had never considered accommodating the demands of its African workers. Mining accounted for well over 50 percent of South African government revenues, and employed the most despotic labor methods, using migrant workers who were considered expendable. In order to protect the mining industry's ability to attract African workers, the government enforced laws that effectively extended these deplorable conditions to all African workers, regardless of industry or duty. African workers were denied union representation and were all legally classified as "labourers" at mining industry rates of pay without regard to their skills or position.⁶ Such conditions did not foster labor stability and threatened war production. If African workers went out on strike, war production could be thrown into chaos. Alternatively, any improvement in the conditions of employment for African factory workers could prompt demands by African miners and threaten the profitability of the mines, as well as the basis of South Africa's economy. If South African officials followed policies of cooperation and integration similar to those initiated elsewhere in Africa, the labor structure of the powerful mining industry could collapse. How could South African officials stabilize this work force in order to secure production throughout the war without threatening the country's economy? 6

     And South African officials encountered one additional complication: European craftsmen who held powerful and highly paid factory positions and who fought what they perceived to be threats to their position as a labor "aristocracy" in the industrial workplace. These workers enjoyed a monopoly of political and economic power as skilled white workers and could not be pushed aside easily in favor of disenfranchised and low-paid African workers. Eddie Webster and Jon Lewis have written well-documented studies that argue that, during the war and the decade immediately thereafter, South African officials and employers nevertheless sought with some success to weaken the position of these craftsmen by changing the very processes of production.⁷ New techniques were introduced to expedite massive wartime production, relying more heavily on machine manufacture and therefore less on skilled workers. In particular, Webster and Lewis argue that new technologies resulted in a process of "deskilling," which undermined the power of skilled (white) workers and opened the door to the greater use of semi-skilled (African) workers. The technological changes reduced the control of the European workers over the production process while at the same time introducing less expensive but potentially more volatile African workers. Webster and Lewis both argue that, during the war years, "craft" unions began to identify themselves as exclusively "white" unions, increasingly basing privilege on race and that this worker racism carried through into the postwar years and the initiation of apartheid.⁸ In short, the introduction of African factory workers during the war led to increasing white racism and the institution of apartheid. 7

     But this is not exactly what happened during the war. The conflation of industrial transformation, increasing white racism, and apartheid does not explain the process whereby these three phenomena followed one another. If such factors had been brought together simultaneously during the war—in particular, the introduction of African workers into the wartime factories—the combination of white and African labor unrest would have paralyzed South African production not only in wartime factories but in the all-important mines as well. Although Africans eventually took such jobs, they were not allowed in to the semi-skilled factory positions until well after the war and even after the institution of apartheid. In a work on labor unions during the war, Peter Alexander argues that this was the case and that the unions were able to hold the status quo.⁹ Nevertheless, changes in the production process if not the permanent work force did take place during the war, and separately from the introduction of African workers, since South African officials and employers were eager to streamline production but not to provoke labor instability. South African officials sought to increase factory production without upsetting the labor status quo that reserved skilled jobs for whites and kept Africans, no matter what their job, classified as temporary and unskilled. 8

     White women would provide the solution to South Africa's dilemma. Indeed, an understanding of the role of gender is as crucial as that of the obvious and compelling issues of race and class in order to understand many of the complexities of the South African labor market. Nevertheless, little work has been done to integrate these issues.¹⁰ Webster and Lewis each make only a brief reference—no more than a sentence or two—to the role of women in this process. Iris Berger, on the other hand, has written a very detailed study of women in South African industry. She has focused in particular on the ways in which female workers organized to improve their conditions of labor. Yet, while including a brief but illuminating chapter on the activities of women war workers, she argues that their disappearance from the engineering workplace upon the cessation of hostilities meant that they had no long-term impact either on the industry or on the structure of production.¹¹ I would argue that gender is the missing piece of the South African puzzle, which allows for industrial change during the war without attendant political upheaval. 9

     Adopting for the moment a comparative focus, gender emerges as a determinant element in changes made worldwide under wartime conditions of production. Indeed, women have made a significant and long-term difference to the structures of production in which they engage. Maurine Greenwald, for example, in her study of the impact of World War I on female workers in the United States, has argued that not only did women enter war production in huge numbers but that their labor was fundamental to the "dilution of craft skills." New workers, especially women, were brought in to do the jobs previously limited to men deemed "skilled" workers, particularly in the American engineering industry, and they consequently changed these jobs in significant ways.¹² Laura Lee Downs, in an examination of the impact of gender on the French and British manufacturing industries from the beginning of World War I to the end of the 1930s, also demonstrated the ways in which "gender intersected with structural transformations in the labor process." She argues that, while women entered manufacturing in considerable numbers—"the story of new opportunities for women"—once in the work force, they were subjected to a wide range of restrictions, such as lower pay and poorer conditions of labor than men. "Gender," Downs contends, "was . . . transformed from a principle of excluding women into a basis for dividing labor within a newly fragmented labor process."¹³ In a third example, Ruth Milkman has looked at the way in which U.S. employers during World War II justified the use of female labor in their factories. In the United States, as in Europe, this justification had a long-term impact on the development of processes of mass production: "The emphasis on the idiom of sex-typing on the physical limitations of women workers . . . justified the sexual division of labor [and] it also served as the basis for increased mechanization and work simplification."¹⁴ These three examples help demonstrate the long-term impact of gender on the restructuring of production during wartime. 10

     The introduction of women—white and coloured¹⁵ —into industrial jobs formerly held by white men in World War II South Africa likewise allowed the restructuring of South African industry. During the war, employers and the government used women, despite vociferous objections from the white unions, to re-gender and "dilute" skilled positions as techniques of mass production were developed, and did so in a manner that would have risked great labor upheavals had they attempted to use African men in these same positions. These wartime changes allowed production to expand and kept worker unrest to a minimum. After the war, these gendered categories of operative labor—the backbone of machine production—became re-racialized as African workers were moved into the jobs formerly held by women. The re-gendering of the South African workplace created new divisions in the work force that allowed the introduction of Africans into jobs with low pay and few rights. The implementation of apartheid shortly thereafter would further undermine African workers' rights and protect the mining industry by putting all African workers on par as temporary "sojourners" in the white cities. 11

South Africa was not ready to go to war in 1939.¹⁶ The country was politically divided, and opponents of the entry into war began arming themselves in readiness for internal conflict as they had during the first world war.¹⁷ Nevertheless, the administration of Jan Smuts committed itself to raising and equipping a large military force, providing raw materials for Allied production, and meeting domestic needs for manufactured goods. Because Smuts did not want to antagonize any further the Afrikaner opponents of the war, his government chose not to introduce conscription, and the South African military had to depend on approximately 132,000 white volunteers. With regard to wartime industrial production, however, an element of compulsion was introduced in February 1941 when artisans were made subject to government regulation with regard to where, under what terms, and for how long they could work.¹⁸ Men subjected to such government regulation ("conscripted" was the term used by union leaders to describe their condition) comprised almost double those serving in uniform, with 210,000 whites working in South Africa's industrial sector during World War II.¹⁹ These numbers were part of the massive mobilization of the entire country. 12

     In order to produce the necessary war goods, South African industry would be transformed from one based on craft to one based on mechanization. Until the outbreak of war, "the engineering industry . . . had been mainly a jobbing industry doing repair and maintenance work for the mines," with "little manufacture . . . done." The "engineering industry" consisted primarily of 150 small "private shops on the Rand" (South Africa's major mining center), where a work force consisting "almost exclusively of skilled artisans" repaired and maintained mining equipment.²⁰ Nevertheless, based on massive iron-ore reserves and a fledgling state-run steel industry, Prime Minister Smuts felt confident in agreeing to supply the Allies with 40,000 tons of iron ore and £1 million worth of ammunition per month for the duration of the war.²¹ Smuts also provided government funds to establish eight new state-run plants for the manufacture of war materiel and to install £6 million worth of machinery and equipment at private engineering firms.²² And production methods at these factories would change. "War production," as an official memorandum on the history of employment during the war noted, "was based upon standardisation of components so that they were interchangeable" and therefore "necessitated a different method of production" from the individual crafting of replacement parts undertaken at most pre-war engineering firms. It was the difference between individual craft and mass production. Key to this new process of mass production would be the expansion of the work force and a "dilution" of labor skills, something that the individual white craftsmen in the small shops had struggled against for decades.²³ 13

     Since skilled workers were in seriously short supply and were urgently needed by the lucrative mining industry, the government decided to introduce less skilled workers into the ammunition factories.²⁴ In January 1940, the government negotiated an agreement with employers and unions to permit the employment of "emergency workers," in positions in which they would normally not be considered qualified and at 85 percent of the usual wage.²⁵ The government had difficulty finding such workers, and tried direct recruitment through its own training program, the Central Organisation of Technical Training (COTT). Although more than 22,000 went through COTT training, only 306 graduates worked in industry by the end of the war. The bulk entered the army instead, where they found better benefits.²⁶ Despite its best efforts, the government found few white men willing to work in the country's wartime factories. 14

     Failing to recruit sufficient numbers of white males into the factories, the government faced a serious challenge. There were millions of Africans available for training and employment, yet their introduction into skilled and semi-skilled jobs would constitute a dramatic change in labor relations. Labor stability was crucial during the war, but offering African workers union representation, as in the other African colonies, would overturn the mining labor model. Furthermore, it would provoke the ire of the white artisans who were still so crucial to the country's war effort. If war production were indeed to be placed on a stable and expanded footing, new and uncontroversial sources of labor would have to be tapped. 15

Women provided an obvious source of "diluted" labor in a situation in which white men were in short supply and Africans on the basis of their race were excluded from consideration as emergency workers. Women had been "economically active" in manufacturing since the beginning of the century, particularly in the clothing and food processing industries, where the craft unions accepted their positions as semi-skilled workers. By the 1930s, they formed the bulk of the work force in these industries.²⁷ Most of the women employed were Afrikaners—many of whom had a long history of trade union activity—but there was also an increasing number of coloured women at work, especially in clothing.²⁸ The unions had already accepted the presence of these women on the factory floor in semi-skilled and fairly low-paid jobs. Still, at the beginning of the war, less than 20 percent of white women over the age of fifteen, and only 33 percent of coloured, were officially defined as economically active compared with figures for white and coloured males of 87 and 93 percent respectively.²⁹ For government officials and employers alike, these women clearly offered a potentially enormous and relatively noncontroversial source of war workers. 16

     For their part, women in great numbers would seek employment as wartime emergency workers, motivated by a desire to serve their country "during a most critical period of Nazi aggression" but also to escape the often-indigent conditions in which many lived. They came primarily from sectors of the population identified half a decade earlier by the Carnegie Commission on Poor Whites as consisting of "paupers," and were primarily Afrikaners. Their entry into the work force had been going on since the beginning of the century, despite the political depiction of Afrikaner women as devoted mothers and homemakers. Referred to as "volksmoeders," or mothers of the nation, Afrikaner women were typically portrayed as devoted to the private or domestic sphere rather than participants in the public sphere.³⁰ Nonetheless, many young single rural Afrikaner women were responsible for the upkeep of their impoverished relatives.³¹ They saw in war production a chance to earn the funds that could be remitted "home" or as a way to escape from their depressing and difficult rural circumstances. Others had been in the cities of the Rand for several years, already having been driven into factory work, jobs in shops, or domestic labor in order to support their rural dependents or to survive. There were also considerable numbers of married or widowed older women. These were driven—like Mrs. M. J. du Plessis, "utterly unable to feed, clothe, and pay the house rent" from her husband's income as a shunter for the Iscor mining and steel company, and Mrs. C. Berry, a widower for thirteen years with three teenagers to support, and Mrs. C. M. J. van Zyl, recently divorced after an "unhappy" married life and without any income whatsoever—into munitions work in order to support themselves and their families.³² Women in South Africa, as around the world, flocked to these jobs for a variety of personal reasons. 17

     For their part, employers were happy to hire these women. With a female emergency worker agreement in place in 1940, engineering firms, the mines, and government agencies immediately began hiring women for war production, placing most of them in semi-skilled jobs.³³ Proving that the use of the women did not threaten mining's labor structure, a "number of mines" had women at work on munitions production by the end of 1940, despite the lack of a specific agreement between employers and unions permitting the extension of such labor to gold mining.³⁴ The government itself hired over a thousand women to work at the South African Mint in Pretoria to operate presses, stamps, and lathes in the production of bombs and ammunition as well as military badges, and hundreds more to work for the South African Railways and the Post Office.³⁵ All employers were eager to use the women, and they quickly filled a majority of the emergency positions in the wartime engineering factories. 18

The terms of the women's employment differed markedly from those of the male "emergency workers." Whereas men viewed as "unqualified" by the unions were being paid the "qualified" rate of wages, throughout the war women were to be defined as "temporary" workers only and paid much less than the male emergency workers. Unlike their male counterparts hired as emergency labor or as COTT trainees, the women were never guaranteed long-term employment following the war. Indeed, the unions would only agree to the use of women in engineering if it was made clear that they would not qualify to remain in the industry beyond the duration of the war. 19

     The women were restricted to semi-skilled jobs, and their wage rates were quickly reduced. The craft unions insisted that the women could only do repetition work.³⁶ The training time was cut drastically from three years to one, with the effect of also cutting the pay level for the fully trained women.³⁷ By September 1940, employers instituted pay rates for the women's jobs that were significantly lower than the "peacetime" rates for the same jobs.³⁸ At that time, the maximum rate the women could be paid was almost 20 percent less than that paid to male operatives.³⁹ By 1941, the government went a step further and instituted the practice of paying a lower rate to all women regardless of their job on the basis of their sex. In May 1941, the controller of industrial manpower set the maximum rate for women emergency workers "irrespective of occupation" at 75 percent of that of men.⁴⁰ Despite the advantages to male workers, the unions worried about the precedent being set. They complained that "a cheaper class of labour" having been "trained and demonstrated its ability to discharge the work" would have the long-term effect of "(a) inducing the Industry to endeavour to retain this [cheaper] standard when profit control is no more, or (b) compel the Industry to demand this standard as a result of the Consumer's awareness of the cheaper cost of production."⁴¹ Indeed, why pay more for skill deemed unnecessary? 20

     When women started moving into skilled jobs at lower pay, the unions' worst fears were realized. Evidence for this development came from the reports of the government inspector of female labor, who reported in 1941 that several women on each shift had "gradually been trained to take complete charge of the finishing machines and displace journeymen" at one workshop.⁴² Under normal peacetime labor conditions, promotion from learner-operative to operative was meant to take at least two years and up to five, that from operative to journeyman perhaps longer, yet here were women making the jump from unskilled to skilled in little more than a year. Moreover, employers were pressing constantly "to extend the scope of women workers to the Journeyman's occupation," and to "employ women on normal production" as well as on munitions. They did so on the basis of an argument that women workers had "proved capable of performing the work in question as efficiently as male labour." The unions disagreed, arguing that the women were not performing skilled jobs but still needed supervision. Due to their lack of skills, they should be paid only 75 percent of the wage "called for as a minimum in the case of the Journeyman."⁴³ Employers were more than happy to pay the lower rates while still employing the women in skilled positions. 21

     "Two different pay rates for parallel lines of work" was the accusation made by the unions by the end of 1941. Certain that means were "being sought to extend the scope of women workers to the Journeymen's occupation," and to apply the lower female operative rate of pay to the skilled positions, the unions demanded equal pay for equal work.⁴⁴ The unions were concerned not that women were underpaid nor that there was an "immediate danger" to "established wage standards, but because of the danger inherent in training a large number of persons to perform such work at a lesser rate for Post-war purposes."⁴⁵ If such work could be performed with limited skills and lowered wages during the war, how could the unions justify the necessity of more skilled and higher-paid workers after the war? Nevertheless, the Chamber of Mines, the country's largest employer, replied that equal pay for women was "absurd."⁴⁶ 22

     Rather than equal pay, employers were eager to extend sex-based wage rates throughout industry. The industrialists argued in heavily gendered terms that the lower rate "was not entirely foreign" to women's "normal earning standards," that in practice "4 women" were "required to perform one journeyman's work," that it seemed "logical that a woman should be given the same rates of pay as an apprentice who can be assumed to have the same earning capacity," that women were after all just "temporary" workers, and that it was "psychologically justified" that women should be "on a common basis" as to pay rates. They also justified the case for a lower wage rate for female than for male emergency workers on the basis that there were "practically no male emergency workers . . . at present available"; therefore, the sex-based pay differential would be hardly evident to those concerned. Low paid, assumed to lack the skills of male workers, and psychologically pre-determined by their sex to favor the same rate of pay irrespective of individual abilities: such was the employers' view of the essential qualities of the female war worker.⁴⁷ 23

     It was difficult for the unions to counteract the employers' viewpoint since they believed that the women were less well trained than the males and clearly intended to be temporary. Nevertheless, R. Glastonbury of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) tried to argue that female workers should be "remunerated for the work they will perform on the basis of that work, and not on the sex of the worker," and remarked that women workers had proved as efficient as male. And he rejected the employers' recommendation for a uniformly low wage for women on the grounds that this would provide unfair competition for regular workers, especially the skilled. Rather than advocate equal pay for equal work, however, he suggested that the rate of pay for women engaged in normal production be set at 15 to 25 percent lower than that paid to men, with some differentials based on the job.⁴⁸ The unions hoped to preserve some differentiation between jobs based on training and skill, and automatically to extend this justification to include gender. 24

     The government eventually struck a compromise, allowing employers to hire women into skilled positions at 75 percent of the male rate.⁴⁹ In May 1942, the controller of industrial manpower approved the extension of the emergency use of female labor from munition into regular production although, at "the insistence of Trade Unions [determined] to protect the status of the artisan," he established official female hourly rates of pay at least 25 percent below those of regular male employees. In reality, however, women received far different benefits from the men and earned between a sixth and a quarter—not 75 percent—of the actual take-home pay of male semi-skilled workers and between an eighth and a fifth that of journeymen. Even the highest paid women doing skilled work earned only a third of the take-home wage of their male peers.⁵⁰ The numbers of such cheap workers seemed sure to increase when the government, in May 1942, announced that employers could make application to the controller of industrial labor for permission to hire women into journeyman positions.⁵¹ 25

     Despite their threats, the unions gradually acquiesced to the use of the women in skilled and semi-skilled jobs, both at lower pay and with less training than had been required for white males before the war.⁵² While the unions, especially the AEU, worried that a precedent would be set for postwar wage standards, they still clung to the stipulation that these workers were only "temporary," and thus their terms of employment were somehow aberrant and exceptional. The unions recognized that the use of the women did not transgress the racial divide between European and African workers and thus did not threaten the unions' equation of race and skill. The women were holding the jobs, if not all of the privileges, formerly associated with skilled labor. 26

The temporary employment of women in normal production, especially in skilled positions, expanded rapidly after 1942.⁵³ The controller of manpower announced in January 1943 that women should be trained in "general fitting and machining (including turning)." He stated, "It is not intended to utilise the services of these persons in work of a repetitive nature similar to that of operatives but it is desired that they should perform the duties usually assigned to journeymen."⁵⁴ Previously male positions were reclassified as women's journeyman jobs, and the rates of pay applied to the category were effectively reduced.⁵⁵ When the controller allowed the women to "work on single purpose lathes of all types and operations in the manufacture of electrical equipment" in 1941, one employer estimated that "80 percent of the machinery" in munitions factories by 1942 was "being run by women."⁵⁶ Although the department of labor was well aware that these actions could pose a threat to the future livelihood of the male workers, the controller allowed the increasing use of the women. 27

     The government quickly moved beyond allowing the practice of employing women in the skilled jobs to encouraging it. The government-operated COTT instituted in April 1943 two special courses: a "Fitters Course for Civilian Women" and a "Machine Tool Operators Course for Civilian Women Personnel."⁵⁷ The aim of these courses, in the words of a representative of the controller, was not to "turn out women journeymen anything as proficient as an apprentice" but to provide "technical and mechanical knowledge" sufficient to enable emergency workers "to function as a useful production unit" in an industry increasingly demanding "more highly skilled women."⁵⁸ Even the Post Office announced that it intended to "train young women for engineering workshop duties which are more appropriate to them than to men"—the department's chief engineer praised women's "nimble fingers and good eyesight"—and in time to utilize those employed "on machine tools now used for war production . . . [and] later on for production of civil needs." Particularly disturbing for the male unions was the Post Office's statement that it was training women for "a permanent occupation," not one that would end with the war.⁵⁹ The unions complained bitterly throughout the war that what was supposed to be a wartime exception to be decided case by case was becoming an industry practice.⁶⁰ Much as the unions did not want women in regular production, they could not keep them out by objecting to their cheapness (real) or their lack of skill (presumed). 28

     Contemporary evidence shows that observers at the time considered that the introduction of women made a profound impact on production processes. The first official history of manpower written after the war noted, "dilution in the engineering and munitions industry as a whole was considerable [and] was achieved by the use of women."⁶¹ Indeed, female emergency workers far outnumbered males. In 1942, there were twenty-six times as many women employed as emergency workers by engineering firms on the Rand as there were men.⁶² Women overall accounted for the largest single group of new white employees engaged in war production by the metals and engineering industry. By 1943, there were as many women employed in engineering (an industry that had employed no females before the war) as the entire white work force employed by the metals industry a decade earlier.⁶³ By 1944, female operatives accounted for 16 percent of the work force engaged in munitions production, almost half as large again as the proportion (11 percent) comprised by white males.⁶⁴ 29

     The introduction of the women into the engineering industry had transformed the labor force. For the first time, white males no longer enjoyed a monopoly of control over skilled industrial jobs. These women were working in jobs formerly classified as "journeymen" positions, the highest in the labor hierarchy. And they were performing the work with less training and at lower pay than the white males who had previously held the jobs. This dramatic break with past practice was possible under the emergency conditions of wartime, and was justified through gendered discrimination. Nonetheless, it created a precedent that would help erode the pre-war labor hierarchy of skill based on race and gender. More important, South African women would also prove instrumental in reshaping the very production process itself in war factories, leaving a lasting legacy of their work. 30

While the unions worried about the temporary use of women in skilled positions in factories throughout South Africa, they were simultaneously faced with the expansion of an established group of semi-skilled female workers who were employed at the South African Mint. The mint had employed women since well before the war, making coins and military badges. When the war began, the mint substantially expanded its operations, running three plants in Pretoria and one in Johannesburg for the production of "shell cases, shell and mortar fuses and the manufacture of jigs, gauges and dies for the S.A. Mint ammunition plants." The Pretoria plants hired almost 1,500 white women (most of them Afrikaners), and the mint-operated plants in other parts of the county hired an additional 485. A mint newly opened at Kimberley relied on coloured women to carry out semi-skilled work in the production of cartridge cases and bullets and the reconditioning of fired shell casings. Another new plant at Ladysmith used Indian men for semi-skilled operations, some of them skilled furniture-makers from Durban who had volunteered for war production in that city but whose labor the department of labor felt could not be used there, given the likelihood of "strong opposition from the Trade Unions concerned." The bulk of the work force was made up of Africans hired as "labourers," performing manual work. Overall, white females accounted for almost 60 percent of the white work force and 25 percent of the total number of workers employed by the mint.⁶⁵ 31

     The attitude of the government and the unions to these women was similar to that toward the women at the other factories. They believed that these women could fill a need without significantly changing the postwar labor status quo. For the government men who ran the mint, women with their "deftness and skill" offered an abundant source of cheap labor that could be relied on to mass-produce munitions with the "fineness and accuracy" that such work required.⁶⁶ The unions once again expected these women to leave the factories after the war.⁶⁷ Although the women would be forced out of the factories through a catastrophic accident rather than through union pressure, government and union officials were wrong in assuming that the mass-production techniques they helped develop would also disappear. 32

     The women at the South African Mint worked under deplorable conditions before and during the war. The mint had a history dating well before the war of employing female workers at dramatically low wages. Irrespective of the fact that women worked in a variety of positions, all received what was officially designated as a "women's rate" of pay.⁶⁸ The mint maintained its practice of paying a low women's rate well into the war, although it did introduce some differentiation in wages based on occupation. Nevertheless, such a wage rate produced a weekly take-home pay for female skilled and unskilled workers that amounted to less than that paid to a white male unskilled laborer.⁶⁹ The women complained that it was "in keeping with Christian principles, and with the liberal view of civilized progress to promote reasonable living conditions and a fair scale of wages . . . [We] are sacrificing more . . . for a keen sense of loyalty and willingness to assist the war effort."⁷⁰ The influx of women brought about by the coming of the war, and the numerous new positions created by the development of mass production, placed these sexually discriminatory rates in stark relief. One labor inspector noted in April 1941, "In some instances women are working side by side with men on the same type of work, using the same machines and tools but being paid very much less . . . no Government could justify compelling women to work 66 to 77 hours per week in order to earn, on the average, 50s. to 60s." The inspector thought these conditions came very "close to sweating."⁷¹ 33

     The women complained that their working conditions were generally dreadful. They stood on bare cement floors up to ten hours at a stretch, without heat, and sometimes in buildings that had no weatherproofing whatsoever. There were an "inadequate number of wash basins without hot water . . . two lavatories serving from 25 to 100 individuals . . . [and] owing to the shortage of paper, newspaper is being used in some lavatories." As a result, "water taps provide the only washing facilities. Grimy hands are not readily cleansed by water from frozen taps, and meals eaten with dirty hands mixed with grease from the machines cannot be palatable nor hygienic." If the women tried to avail themselves of the first aid equipment, they discovered that it was locked up. If they reported to the first aid station, they were "dosed with aspirins whether their ailment be a bilious attack or a cough." Although the women admitted that most were "unaccustomed to regular incomes and that the work has opened up great opportunities," they also maintained that "it is . . . seemingly unpatriotic to utilize these [wartime] contingencies against the employees."⁷² 34

     Many of the female wartime workers came from rural areas or were otherwise without accommodation, and they were housed in "hostels" on the mint grounds. While they paid for their food and lodging, they were subjected to curfews, controls, and punishments for transgressing the rules. If they missed a meal, they were refused food. There was no sick fund to help them when ill, and they were required to pay for any medicine. In 1944, Mrs. S. B. Johnson, a representative from the controller of manpower concerned that it was becoming increasingly difficult to recruit women at the mint, visited the hostel to investigate the women's complaints. She outlined a situation in which the women workers were treated as "inmates" (her own word), despite the representation of the hostels as a "home" to incoming workers. She concluded, 35

I do not think I am overstating facts when I say that the psychological approach to the women is very wrong . . . There are many juveniles and several old women in the hutments. The former need guidance and great and sympathetic understanding, and the latter can so obviously benefit by a few years of security and happiness which the Hostel and the work at the Mint has offered them. They need reassurance. My recommendation is that Welfare of the women be earnestly considered and that instead of curtailing pleasure in the hutments that such functions be encouraged. Need I point out that the more enjoyment in the house, the less the desire to be out on the streets and the lesser the temptations. ⁷³

Any complaints about their situation resulted in threats. According to the women, "on the slightest provocation [we] are forcibly told by the Staff that for the amount [we] pay, [we] are well catered and cared for, and to seek accommodation elsewhere if [we] are not satisfied."⁷⁴ The women were generally treated as minors regardless of their age, being told where to sit at meals and docked their pay at work for missing a curfew.⁷⁵ They were regarded as temporary, expendable, and apparently ungrateful. 36

     Who would take such low-paid and ill-regarded positions? The wages paid these women were still targeted at single women without dependents, despite the fact that most if not all of the women employed during the war were largely responsible for their families' support.⁷⁶ While the historical record leaves most of the women employed in the mint anonymous, compensation claims made by a small number of the Afrikaner women after the war provide some details about the individual circumstances of white female emergency workers. Most of those hired by the mint prior to the war had conformed to a pattern distinguished by historians with regard to the female factory work force in general: single women, usually from rural areas, who worked to supplement their families' incomes. Those hired during the war were more often married women, usually with dependents, who provided a significant source of income for their families. Indeed, government wartime policy favored married women and the poor. When the recruitment of women began in earnest, the government official in charge of mobilizing women, Grace Cameron-Swan, was instructed by the controller to recruit soldiers' wives first and then "deserving cases," that is, those in financial need. While she found relatively few soldiers' wives in need of work, she received an overwhelming number of applications from the poor, over 1,800 by September 1942, with most of these applicants responsible for an average of five dependents.⁷⁷ 37

     Whether single or married, all the women documented by the compensation claims had difficult family circumstances. There was T. Russo, for example, in her early twenties at the beginning of the war, who worked in the Pretoria Mint with her younger sister, Irma. The two Russo sisters helped their father, a tradesman with the South African Railways, support their mother, a "semi-invalid" suffering "dreadfully with rheumatism," a "mentally deficient" adult brother, another adult sister "paralysed in her left side," and a fifth sibling still at school. Miss H. H. Lewis, also in her early twenties when war broke out, moved from being a "Head Checker" at the "De Luxe Laundry" to work at the mint in order to provide "the upkeep of my aged parents," especially her mother, who was "a very sickly woman suffering from goitre and dropsy." Miss J. S. J. Naude supported her sixty-year-old mother as well as her sister's nine-year-old daughter. Miss D. J. C. Botha, in her late thirties and unmarried, was the sole support for her aged parents (in their late seventies) as well as the orphaned daughter of her deceased sister. Then there was Mrs. E. Ferreira, separated from her husband since 1938 and, because of his failure to provide any child support, solely responsible for their three children (one of whom, her eldest daughter, she had removed from school at thirteen and sent to work "in order to assist me with our living expenses"). And Mrs. M. E. Viviers with five children to support (all school-age or younger), Mrs. L. J. M. de Vos with three, Mrs. M. J. P. du Plessis with three dependents also, all with husbands employed as unskilled laborers by the railways or by Iscor at rates of pay on which it was "utterly impossible" for their families to exist. For these women, factory work provided a means to alleviate their grinding poverty.⁷⁸ 38

Despite their precarious situations, these women soon sought union representation to improve their lot. Unlike the female "emergency" workers governed under the Emergency Agreements, the women at the mint were considered regular employees who had the legal right to negotiate their terms of employment. Government officials early on recognized the likelihood of such a development and considered improving conditions in order to forestall a union.⁷⁹ The male unions were concerned at the introduction of large numbers of women into skilled positions at the mint, but their constitutions prohibited female membership.⁸⁰ The women needed their own representation. 39

     In view of the possible threat posed by female labor to the position of craft workers, the South African Trades and Labour Council (SATLC), an umbrella organization that brought together trade unions in a national organization between 1930 and 1947, decided to create a separate union specifically for female war workers in the engineering industry, the Women Engineering Workers Union (WEWU).⁸¹ The SATLC believed that the union should begin by organizing the largest group of female war workers—those at the mint—and then proceed to extend its activities throughout the rest of the country. In March 1942, the SATLC appointed Mrs. F. J. Engela as the first secretary of the newly organized union.⁸² The director of the mint, J. T. Becklake, objected to the formation of the union on the grounds that mint employees were public servants and should be represented by the Public Servants Association; he suggested that Engela confine her organizing activities to the coloured women at Kimberley. The SATLC replied, "whether the Director is disposed to co-operate or not such organisation will be continued."⁸³ Engela found it "necessary to acquaint him [Becklake] that we would be forced to use such ways and means as we may deem suitable for contriving our objective." Refused entry to the mint, she stood outside the factory gates and signed up several hundred members.⁸⁴ In the face of such tactics, and learning from his government superiors that they had no objections to such a union so long as it restricted its activities to white and coloured women and excluded Africans, the director of the mint backed down. By May 1942, the WEWU had enrolled almost half the white women at the Pretoria Mint; by July, over three-quarters were union members.⁸⁵ 40

     Once the women started negotiating in earnest, they began to appreciate how difficult it would be to wrest concessions from their employers. Their umbrella union, SATLC, did not include the women in industry-wide negotiations for a wage agreement. Instead, Engela was informed that the WEWU was "directly responsible to the National Executive Committee of this Council."⁸⁶ The women were on their own in negotiations with the mint management. Their complaints that it was "unpatriotic" of employers to exploit them and apparently to intend to treat them as "mere novices" for the duration of the war fell on deaf ears.⁸⁷ In frustration, many of the women left the mint in search of higher pay as emergency workers at the other factories, with 1,000 out of 1,700 female employees leaving during the first six months of 1942.⁸⁸ Finally, there was some improvement in 1942 with a slight increase in wages, but they were still substantially below those set by the controller for female emergency workers and much less than those paid to male workers.⁸⁹ 41

     Nevertheless, the women were changing the production process at the mint if not their own pay and work conditions. A new, intermediate class of jobs was emerging that combined some skill with low wages and few rights. Most of the women at the mint were performing semi-skilled work and were termed "operatives," unlike the female "journeymen" in the private plants. By 1942, women were classified under four new categories in place of the ten categories of labor in the 1937 industrial agreement (which was still in force in the engineering industry at large).⁹⁰ None of these new categories recognized the unionized women as skilled workers.⁹¹ Most (83 percent) of the women at the Pretoria Mint were employed in the two lowest categories, with nearly 50 percent in the bottom category, "general operators." Only 1 percent received the top wage rate of 2s. 2d. an hour.⁹² And even those women who did move on to more specialized jobs at the mint found that, as a rule, they still received the same rate of pay as if they were entry-level workers.⁹³ The mint works manager did not believe that even women supervisors shouldered much responsibility but "were merely in charge of the women," and did not deserve higher pay.⁹⁴ Management justified the lower rate of wages paid to women on the basis of their sex by comparing their wages with the rates paid in the leather, clothing, tobacco, and printing industries—ones historically dominated by female labor—rather than with the pay rates received by males doing comparable jobs in the engineering industry.⁹⁵ A separate agreement drawn up for the coloured women who worked at the Kimberley Mint set their wages at 10 percent less than those established for white women.⁹⁶ The WEWU even tried to get the employers to agree to pay some of the women on the basis of piecework in order to allow some increase in wages, but the mint refused.⁹⁷ 42

     These jobs were all considered "women's work" and pay was set accordingly. Women who even officials at the mint admitted were doing exactly the same job as journeymen were never "considered as full journeymen" and so were denied the higher pay and benefits of their fellow workers throughout the war.⁹⁸ All of the machine operators—working on capstans, thread millers, drilling and press working machines, cutting, cupping and forming, weighing and gauging machines—received what they described as "disgracefully inadequate [wages]. Standing at [the] machines, in many cases, with continually wet hands [while] the construction of the machines renders the operators pre-eminently liable to injury."⁹⁹ Responsible for the bulk of production, these women were nevertheless treated as temporary minors without rights. 43

     Since these jobs were confidently expected to be temporary, the unions had no concerns about the devaluing of work at the mint as they had elsewhere in the engineering industry and blatantly put the interests of their members ahead of the women. The AEU found nothing objectionable in the manager of the mint's claim that women should be paid less than men on the grounds that "these were two sets of employees [deserving different rates of pay]."¹⁰⁰ The AEU did, however, want the meager benefits accorded women in their September 1942 agreement with the mint to apply with full force for all of the male workers. They also argued that male operatives in the mint doing the same work as women should receive the higher rates of pay ruling in private industry.¹⁰¹ In turn, the skilled male workers at the mint demanded proportionate upgrading and won, after threatening to go out on strike.¹⁰² When members of the AEU later found their jobs at these improved conditions threatened in 1944 by low wage competition from women, the union went so far as to recommend that the women should "be dismissed" rather than paid an equal wage.¹⁰³ In other words, their union allies believed that the women were "expendable," and that they should be fired before any improvement in their wages might threaten the men's jobs. 44

     Desperate, the women made an appeal to public opinion. The union disseminated widely a letter praising the contributions of the soldiers overseas but pointing out that "their efforts would be worthless were it not for the women who are working day and night to produce the required munitions and ammunitions." While emphasizing the importance of loyalty in the national struggle, the women nevertheless revealed that they were "impoverished," frequently ill because of the poor conditions of work, and often provided with no medical attention. Government officials thought the letter "not . . . altogether . . . desirable."¹⁰⁴ Alternatively, antiwar Afrikaners saw an opportunity to undermine the war effort by exploiting the women's grievances. Engela rebuffed approaches from representatives of the incipient Afrikaner Christian Nationalist trade union, who stood outside the mint gates calling on female workers not to travel in vehicles driven by African drivers and claiming that godless communists were cold-bloodedly selling out the workers to a black proletariat. When Engela complained to the government that such people were "endeavouring to capture my Union on racial lines" and trying to create an antiwar sentiment "in one of the most important war factories in South Africa," the Christian Nationalists "incited the workers to take violent action" against Engela and "actually used the following words '. . . tear her to pieces.'"¹⁰⁵ The women found little support in the arena of public opinion. 45

     Fed up with the machinations of their white male counterparts, in 1943 the women sought out new allies, including African male workers. Indeed, the rates of pay of the bulk of the white women operators at the mint remained much closer to those set for African laborers than to those of white male operators.¹⁰⁶ The WEWU changed its name to the South African Mint Employees Union and opened its membership to all workers, temporary and permanent, irrespective of sex or race, and excluding only artisans and emergency workers.¹⁰⁷ Having already achieved considerable success at getting coloured women to join her union in 1942, despite the "ill-founded prejudice of Europeans" against such a move, in 1944 Engela hired an African organizer to recruit potential union members from among the 6,000 African males working at the various mint plants. Engela documented the appalling conditions of these workers, often fired when injured or ill rather than provided with medical treatment, and expected to "pay Poll Tax, support a wife and children, acquire clothes, purchase tobacco and pay for entertainment on the scandalous wage of £1/4/0 per week," not enough (in Engela's opinion) to keep them from starving.¹⁰⁸ The women were discovering that their plight was more similar to the African workers'—also temporary and considered expendable—than to that of their alleged union allies. 46

     Indeed, by 1944, the wage structure at the mint was clearly organized on the basis of a gender and racial hierarchy, despite similarities in job duties. At the top of the wage and job classification structure was a small group (4 percent of the total work force) of white male artisans. Below them, a larger number (11 percent of the work force) of white male "operatives" earned up to four times as much as the white and coloured women, and Asian and coloured men, restricted by their sex or race to the semi-skilled category (white males had a monopoly on skill). This underprivileged and underpaid group of operatives formed the second largest group of workers at the plant (29 percent) and received uniformly low rates of pay (further subjected to gradations by job, sex, and race), little higher than those paid to the employees who formed the largest part of the work force (48 percent), African males. While most of the latter were as a result of their race categorized as manual laborers, some, at the Kimberley and Ladysmith plants, were actually working as operatives.¹⁰⁹ The wage hierarchy was clearly stratified by race and gender. 47

Events overtook the women's union before recruitment efforts among African workers could bear fruit. In March 1945, an explosion at the Loading Field plant of the Pretoria Mint killed 28 workers (12 white females, 12 African males, and 3 white men) and left another 250 injured, many severely.¹¹⁰ With the facility in ruins, the rest of the workers at the mint were placed on half time, production was closed down for the rest of the war, and most were eventually dismissed.¹¹¹ With the end of the war in sight, and munitions production no longer needed, the mint also fired all the coloured workers at Kimberley, women the government referred to disparagingly as "ex-domestic Coloured servants who are insistent that their future employment should be as favourable as with the Mint."¹¹² Even before the explosion, the government had foreseen a point at which female labor would no longer be needed for munitions production, and hoped that the women would find employment as waitresses, dressmakers, and hairdressers back in the country areas they had left in order to escape poverty.¹¹³ While the explosion provided a reason to close down the plant, the government was still worried that the women would try to remain in the area looking for comparable work. To encourage them to leave Pretoria altogether, the government provided female workers with a one-way rail pass upon their dismissal and, in the face of continued resistance to the enforced repatriation, considered also offering the women a cash bonus to go "home."¹¹⁴ 48

     Such policies returned many of the women to the same poverty they had tried to escape in first seeking work at the mint. Miss T. Russo had not been physically injured when the plant blew up, but a year after the explosion she was still unemployed, constantly nervous, and terribly depressed, whether from her injuries, her economic situation, or as a result of several years' service at the mint. Likewise, Misses Lewis, Naude, and Botha had all suffered injuries ranging from bruised shoulders to impaired sight and hearing. Each recounted in her claim for financial compensation daily pain combined frequently with "fits of depression." Miss Naude still "could not compose . . . [herself] sufficiently" to speak to a prospective employer. The married women mentioned earlier—Ferriera, Viviers, de Vos, and du Plessis—likewise complained between them of various ailments ranging from bruised bodies to lost hearing and deteriorating eyesight, a common complaint resulting from years of detail work at the mint. Their main difficulty appeared to be that their "nerves [were] constantly on edge." This combination of physical and mental difficulties left those harmed by the explosion often unable to undertake their own housework (all had dependents for whose upkeep they were responsible) and almost without exception unable to undertake regular employment. As a result, their families had to try and scrape together a "hand to mouth existence," sometimes not able to afford more than a tent in which to live, and fantasizing about extremely modest futures. Several expressed hope that they could be compensated with enough money to buy a few chickens and perhaps a small rural property. Enough perhaps, in the words of Mrs. C. J. Muller, married in 1911 and the main support during the Great Depression of her husband (a poorly paid laborer) and their nine children (six of whom either fought in World War II or worked in munitions production), that she might be able to "have a garden and grow vegetables and flowers." None of the injured received any compensation from the government, and all had great difficulty securing assistance from a public fund set up to aid them. The officials administering the fund paid out miniscule sums to some of the injured while accusing many of those who requested help of suffering not from real injuries but from "compensationitis" and "pensionitis."¹¹⁵ 49

     The large-scale dismissal of women from the mint signaled the removal of females in general from the engineering industry and made way for the return of the white male veterans to jobs that had been permanently altered.¹¹⁶ No longer needing workers for war production, and faced by union demands for the elimination of what was regarded as a form of cheap labor competition, the controller of industrial manpower and private employers alike gave notice to the emergency workers (practically all of them women).¹¹⁷ At the same time, the available number of jobs in engineering expanded as the national income doubled, and the number of people economically active increased 34 percent in the decade 1936–1946.¹¹⁸ Much of this expanded production was made possible by the use of machinery used previously for munitions production.¹¹⁹ Leading engineering firms bought valuable jigs and gauges, used to set the repetitive operations of machines for mass production, for as little as 10 percent of their original cost.¹²⁰ As Eddie Webster has argued, production processes initiated during the war brought about the mechanization of the engineering industry.¹²¹ 50

     But would the introduction of new industrial technologies translate into a new labor structure, or would industry be forced to revert to the pre-war skill hierarchy? Employers anticipated that in the postwar period industrial output would continue to expand and were concerned that the old hierarchy built on skill would drive up labor costs. Employers argued that if women could do such work the jobs could not be that difficult, or expensive.¹²² And although there were significant historical barriers to the employment of Africans in these jobs, the federation of engineering manufacturers believed Africans were "well-suited to perform a good deal of work of a semi-automatic character."¹²³ Since the beginning of the mining industry in the late nineteenth century, Africans had performed all types of jobs from laboring to semi-skilled, but their work had always been labeled by employers and organized labor alike as unskilled and pay rates set accordingly.¹²⁴ White engineering unions had excluded all African workers from membership since the 1910s and the 1920s to protect their monopoly on craft and semi-skilled work and by seeking an industry-wide closed shop agreement. As the industry and its demand for labor grew, they began to open union membership to coloured and Indian workers (legally defined as employees and therefore potentially a source of competition for skilled positions) in the late 1920s and into the 1930s, but the ban on African membership remained absolute. 51

     Although a few Africans had already begun to work in operative positions during the war, this situation only changed in the latter months of 1944 and after, as, with the end of the war in sight, employers began to dismiss women and formally introduce Africans into operative positions already deemed "expendable" through the women's experience. A government survey undertaken in 1946 found that the largest engineering firms—Iscor, Dorman Long, and Stewarts and Lloyds—all employed Africans in "semi-skilled and operative work of a simple or routine nature" as well as in laboring jobs. Stewarts and Lloyds' respondent detailed the situation in which an African operative would be used rather than a European: "when a small amount of skill is required as example where the Operative operates a lever to put a machine in motion which has a purely automatic operation and over which actual operation performed, the non-European has no control."¹²⁵ These were jobs of a type that had not existed in the pre-war workplace. 52

     This shift was only possible due to the renegotiated industrial agreement finally published in 1944 and the further agreement of 1946, which mirrored conditions first established at the mint for the women. The industrial agreement published in 1944 announced a radical new categorization of work for the metals and engineering industry. For the first time ever in an industrial agreement, Africans were formally introduced into the operative category.¹²⁶ In 1946, the movement of Africans into operative positions was facilitated further as the bottom D category was further stratified into three subsets, D1, D2, and D3, with the addition of more jobs related to machine production such as automatic machine operator and operator of a power-driven hoist while not under supervision. Whereas the structure of the 1937 industrial agreement had nine of the ten categories of jobs in the hands of white males, the 1946 agreement divided production almost down the middle, with four job categories still for white males and three primarily, though not exclusively, for African males (D1–D3). And conditions of labor for women were, again for the first time, explicitly addressed, including restrictions and exclusions that also applied to all workers in the operative D category, thereby in effect extending to African men the conditions previously established for female war workers.¹²⁷ 53

     In short, the industrial agreements negotiated between employers and white male unions in 1944 and 1946 represented the impact of wartime deskilling and job devaluation within a context of industrial growth and the development of processes of mass production. If employers at any time had sought before or during the war to reclassify jobs and to introduce Africans rather than the "temporary" women into operative positions, the white trade unions would have certainly opposed such a move through industrial action, and Africans would have demanded the same rights as white male workers. The use of women, however, met the war needs of the country, facilitated the development of machine production, and made possible the quiet and uncontroversial reclassification of jobs. The engineering industry at the end of the war not only produced much more than it did at the beginning, its work processes were also structured quite differently, with women and then Africans recognized formally as part of the operative sector. 54

How can we explain the South African exception or "obvious contrast" as Frederick Cooper described it? While South Africa did not experience the same changes that took place throughout the rest of Africa in the wake of World War II, the country nevertheless underwent radical transformation as a result of the war. With little more than the dominant mining industry and extensive farming before the war, South Africa emerged in the postwar period with an active manufacturing sector and the attendant development of a new work force. The country entered a period of phenomenal economic growth as well as the urbanization of the majority of the population. Nevertheless, South Africa also entered one of the darkest periods of its history with the introduction of apartheid in 1948 and the brutal and relentless oppression of the majority of its population until 1990. Despite examples from elsewhere in Africa and the hopes of many, economic growth and prosperity did not automatically bestow political rights on the majority of South Africa's population. 55

     In South Africa, as elsewhere, there was a complicated connection between political power and economic leverage. As Michael Burawoy demonstrated in his studies of Zambia, Hungary, and the United States, the organization of production and the labor hierarchy on the factory floor parallels the broader economy as well as the political power structure. The organization of production can bestow or withhold political power for categories of workers. As production processes have continually changed throughout the industrial age, political regimes have faced this dilemma, or, as Cooper puts it, the reshaping of a political framework in which a social question is debated. During wartime, this process was not only accelerated, it was also subject to sweeping control by the political system under wartime emergency powers. In the former colonies, the metropolitan countries underestimated the political costs they would pay for securing economic performance. In most other countries during wartime, however, political stabilization was paramount. 56

     In the United States, Britain, and France—as described by Greenwald, Milkman, and Downs—women provided the means to transform production without disturbing political power. Viewed as a "temporary" group, their inclusion in the work force was not considered a breach of the political hierarchy. Perceived as being physically and mentally inferior, the women supposedly necessitated the "dilution" of work. And all of this was justified by employers and governments as part of the demands of wartime rather than the exigencies of industrialization. In South Africa, the government could likewise turn to a group considered safe and expendable—white females—rather than to more threatening African workers for what was perceived as "temporary" participation. Although Africans forcefully resisted their situation in South Africa throughout the war, this gendered solution robbed them of important leverage. And the use of the women also eased the fears of the white population that industry and their jobs were somehow being fundamentally altered during the war. As elsewhere, the women workers were viewed as no threat to the status quo. 57

     Nevertheless, the use of the women also resulted in a restructuring of work and the labor hierarchy that would carry through into the postwar period, allowing for the subsequent introduction of African workers in the South African case. Women were first introduced into "skilled" positions at far lower rates of pay and with less training than their white male predecessors, opening up new categories of pay and work in labor contracts. And women created some of the jobs requiring less skill, training, and receiving less pay that would form the "operative" backbone of the postwar engineering industry. Justified during the war through arguments of female weakness, inferiority, and diminished financial needs, these new labor categories would hold after the war and provide a convenient structure for a racialized industrial work force. 58

     Yet in South Africa, as elsewhere, changing the jobs and the work force also threatened the political framework. In the United States, as Milkman has argued, the subsequent introduction of increasing numbers of African-American workers led to greater demands for civil rights in the postwar period. How did a similar change affect the South African political structure? African workers found increasing opportunities on the factory floor, while their rights as workers remained minimal. With the introduction of apartheid in 1948, the government moved to undercut Africans' leverage by changing their rights as workers to mirror their rights as citizens. African workers, like African citizens, were denied basic rights of representation and security—just as they were in the cities, the polling booths, and the Parliament—creating a factory labor regime that was aligned with the political system. Deemed temporary residents in "white" South Africa, Africans in all occupations lost the few rights of representation, residence, and freedom they still enjoyed prior to the war. Through legislation to limit workers' activities, the right to live in any area outside the "homelands," and even political representation by white politicians, apartheid allowed the introduction of Africans into important jobs while ensuring that their leverage to improve their jobs would be so minimal as to blunt the threats of disruption and instability that worried the colonial powers during World War II. Although African workers would indeed continually protest against their situation, the apartheid "solution" succeeded to an extent sufficient to ensure industrial stability into the postwar period. With the transformation of work accomplished during the war through the use of devalued female workers, the introduction of Africans without rights completed the profitable restructuring of South African industry. 59

     In the 1970s, however, African workers through a series of strikes and other forms of work stoppages demonstrated that their power on the factory floor would force a political transformation. At the forefront of this labor challenge were African operatives in the engineering industry. By the beginning of the decade, African men working in semi-skilled job categories first opened to them by the war experiences of female emergency workers comprised one third of operatives in engineering; by the end of the decade, they were closer to half of the work force. Through their actions in the workplace, they brought production to a halt.¹²⁸ Rather than lose control over the workplace, employers and government officials in South Africa at the end of the 1970s supported legislation that had been earlier repudiated, legalizing African trade unions. Just as colonial administrators had gambled that labor representation was worth the risk of increased political power in order to secure economic stability during the war, South Africa finally reached the same impasse three decades later. The consequences of this choice were to be as fundamental to South Africa in the 1980s as they had been to the rest of Africa in the 1950s, with apartheid overthrown within a decade just as colonialism had been by the beginning of the 1960s. 60

Nancy L. Clark is a professor of history and the director of the University Honors Program at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She has published Manufacturing Apartheid: State Corporations in South Africa (1994), and co-edited Africa and the West: A Documentary History from the Slave Trade to Independence (2001). Her latest book, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (co-written with William H. Worger), will appear in 2002.

Notes

¹ David Killingray and Richard Rathbone, eds., Africa and the Second World War (London, 1986), 1.
² Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996), 173, 262, and, for a succinct discussion of the ambiguities of independence, 457–72. For a reconsideration of African colonialism in general, see Cooper, "Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History," AHR 99 (December 1994): 1516–45; and Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, N.J., 1996).
³ Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 262–63. Michael Burawoy has argued that, under despotic labor regimes, political and civil power is mirrored on the factory floor, whether the political structures are colonial, capitalist, or socialist. See Burawoy, The Colour of Class on the Copper Mines, from African Advancement to Zambianization (Manchester, 1972); Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labour Process under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago, 1979); The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism (London, 1985).
⁴ Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 262–63.
⁵ See, for example, T. Dunbar Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion (Berkeley, Calif., 1975); Dan O'Meara, Volkskapitalisme: Class, Capital, and Ideology in the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1934–1948 (Cambridge, 1983); O'Meara, Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party, 1948–1994 (Johannesburg, 1996); and Deborah Posel, The Making of Apartheid, 1948–1961: Conflict and Compromise (Oxford, 1991).
⁶ On the structure of the South African labor force, see, for example, G. V. Doxey, The Industrial Colour Bar in South Africa (Cape Town, 1961); Stanley Greenberg, Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets, and Resistance in South Africa (Berkeley, Calif., 1987); and Sheila Van der Horst, Native Labour in South Africa (London, 1942). On African trade unions, see Glenn Adler and Eddie Webster, eds., Trade Unions and Democratization in South Africa, 1985–1997 (New York, 2000); Edward Feit, Workers without Weapons: The South African Congress of Trade Unions and the Organization of African Workers (Hamden, Conn., 1975); Baruch Hirson, Yours for the Union: Class and Community Struggles in South Africa, 1930–1947 (London, 1989); and Gay Seidman, Manufacturing Militance: Workers' Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970–1985 (Berkeley, 1994).
⁷ Eddie Webster, Cast in a Racial Mould: Labour Process and Trade Unionism in the Foundries (Johannesburg, 1985); Jon Lewis, Industrialisation and Trade Union Organisation in South Africa, 1924–55: The Rise and Fall of the South African Trades and Labour Council (Cambridge, 1984). On the white working class, see also Robert Davies, Capital, State, and White Labour in South Africa, 1900–1960: An Historical Materialist Analysis of Class Formation and Class Relations (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1979).
⁸ During the war and immediately after, white workers banded together to protect their rights on the basis of their race, despite ethnic divisions within the white work force between English and Afrikaners that played an intermittent role in worker strategies. The steel industry in particular underwent struggles between English and Afrikaans workers resulting in the establishment of separate unions and an ethnically split labor force similar to those described by Edna Bonacich. See, for example, Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States before World War II (Berkeley, Calif., 1984); and Webster, Cast in a Racial Mould.
⁹ Although Alexander argues that white and black workers in fact worked together to improve wages and working conditions, his contentions cannot be supported in this case. Peter Alexander, Workers, War and the Origins of Apartheid (Cape Town, 2000).
¹⁰ The growing literature on South African women examines the ways in which class and race affect women's lives but does not necessarily extend the analysis to consider how the employment of women alternatively affects concepts of race and class. See Belinda Bozzoli, Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900–1983 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1991); Ellen Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman (London, 1985); Emma Mashinini, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: A South African Autobiography (London, 1989); Cherryl Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa (New York, 1991). See also Special Issue on Women, Journal of Southern African Studies 9, no. 2 (October 1983).
¹¹ Iris Berger, Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900–1980 (Bloomington, Ind., 1992), 144. Peter Alexander likewise has argued that, because of the departure of women from the engineering industry after the war, "It is most unlikely that [they] made a significant lasting impact." See Alexander, "Collaboration and Control: Engineering Unions and the South African State, 1939–1945," South African Journal of Sociology 27, no. 2 (1996): 75.
¹² Maurine Weiner Greenwald, Women, War, and Work: The Impact of World War I on Women Workers in the United States (1980; rpt. edn., Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), 116–18, 238.
¹³ Laura Lee Downs, Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the French and British Metalworking Industries, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995), 1–2, 14.
¹⁴ Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana, Ill., 1987), 60.
¹⁵ The term "coloured" refers to a community whose ancestors include Africans and Europeans, as well as slaves brought from southern India and Indonesia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Referred to as "mixed race" by successive white governments, coloureds were denied the legal or economic rights accorded to whites and held a somewhat ambiguous position under segregation and apartheid. Today, the coloureds constitute a significant community within South Africa with a distinct identity. See Wilmot James, Daria Caliguire, and Kerry Cullinan, eds., Now That We Are Free: Coloured Communities in a Democratic South Africa (Boulder, Colo., 1996); Gavin Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall: A History of South African "Coloured" Politics (New York, 1987); John Western, Outcast Cape Town (Berkeley, Calif., 1996). During the war, African women constituted less than 1 percent of the industrial work force, although Africans as a group represented over 50 percent of the industrial work force by the end of the war. In comparison, white women made up approximately 10 percent of the wartime industrial work force. See Union Statistics for Fifty Years (Pretoria, 1960), G6, G7. Urban African women were instead drawn into a number of activities, including entrepreneurial enterprises and domestic work. For examples, see Bozzoli, Women of Phokeng.
¹⁶ Smuts had become prime minister after winning parliamentary support for South Africa's entry into the war in opposition to the policy of neutrality implemented under the government of J. B. M. Hertzog. Hertzog and his Afrikaner supporters resented British imperial policies dating from the nineteenth century. For a useful introduction to the politics of this period, see T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History (Toronto, 1991).
¹⁷ A small group of Afrikaner generals who had served in the South African War organized an incipient rebellion against South Africa's entry into World War I. The rebellion of approximately 11,000 armed Afrikaners was put down by government troops in November 1914. See D. W. Kruger, The Age of the Generals: A Short Political History of the Union of South Africa, 1910–1948 (Johannesburg, 1961).
¹⁸ At the beginning of 1941, a controller of industrial manpower (hereafter, "controller") was appointed (under terms of War Measure No. 6) with the authority to regulate where people worked and the rates of pay they would receive. See H. Tinsdale, "Civil History of the War" (unpub. typescript), pp. 1–2, Papers of the Industrial Manpower Commission, Bc 825, University of Cape Town (hereafter, UCT). See also J. Lewis, Industrialisation and Trade Union Organisation, 100–01.
¹⁹ At the start of the war, South Africa had a permanent force of only 352 officers, 5,033 other ranks, and an Active Citizens Force of 13,490. As the official history of the war states, "To say that South Africa was unprepared for war is no exaggeration." H. J. Martin and Neil D. Orpen, South Africa at War: Military and Industrial Organization and Operations in Connection with the Conduct of the War, 1939–1945 (Cape Town, 1979), 26–27, 346. For employment figures, see Union Statistics for Fifty Years, A30, A33. Large numbers of Africans as well as coloureds and Indians also served as volunteers in the armed forces (123,000) and in industrial production (450,000) during the war. See Louis Grundlingh, "The Recruitment of South African Blacks for Participation in the Second World War," in Killingray and Rathbone, Africa and the Second World War.
²⁰ "Manpower," 2–3, Papers of the Industrial Manpower Commission, Bc 825, UCT. See also Webster, Cast in a Racial Mould, 25.
²¹ Martin and Orpen, South Africa at War, 140; Minutes, Iscor Board of Directors, September 4, 1940, Department of Commerce and Industries Archives, 3263, 509/8, vol. 4B, Central Archives Depot, Pretoria (CAD). All archival records are held in this depot unless otherwise noted.
²² Nancy L. Clark, Manufacturing Apartheid: State Corporations in South Africa (New Haven, Conn., 1994), 112; H. J. van der Bijl, "Report on Organisation, Principles of Purchase and Production," August 14, 1940, Papers of the Industrial Manpower Commission, Bc 825, UCT.
²³ "Manpower," 3, Papers of the Industrial Manpower Commission, Bc 825, UCT.
²⁴ The director-general of supplies in a postwar report noted that there had been a significant shortage of skilled artisans well before the war. See Director-General of Supplies (hereafter, DGS), Circular No. 7, February 1, 1944. On the shortage of artisans, see also Minister of Economic Development Archives (hereafter, MED) 2, Board of Trade and Industries, Report No. 286: Investigation into the Iron, Steel, Engineering and Metallurgical Industries in the Union of South Africa (Pretoria, 1946), 208. Nevertheless, the government estimated that there were 4,800 journeymen employed in the mines in 1944, while commercial manufacturers reported employing 4,600. DGS, Circular No. 11, June 28, 1944, MED, 28; F. C. Williams Memorandum, October 19, 1944, Board of Trade and Industries Archives (hereafter, RHN), 462, 32/5/1, vol. 3. Even when the demand for skilled workers to perform ship repairs at the nation's ports became critical for Allied naval operations, journeymen at the mines remained untouched. DGS, Circular No. 11, June 28, 1944, MED, 28. Government planners continually referred to the fact that the country's postwar industrial development remained dependent on its largest consumer, the mines. See, for example, H. J. van Eck to Minister of Economic Development, September 10, 1943, MED, 22, 3/35, vol. 2. A 1940 government survey confirmed that the economy was too dependent on mining to threaten its labor: out of 110 firms, all but 14 would be affected by a downturn in mining. See the chart showing firms and their dependence on the gold mining industry, June 7, 1940, Industrial and Agricultural Requirements Commission (K302) 3, IRC 6, vol. 1. Even the government mining engineer argued that the state was too dependent on mining revenues to threaten its labor sources. See Government Mining Engineer, "Increased Working Costs on Mines," February 8, 1944, Department of Mines Archives (hereafter, MNW), 1144, mm94/13.
²⁵ The agreement stated that emergency labor could if necessary be employed in skilled positions—categories at the top of the pre-war wage scale ("journeymen's or Grade I Operatives work")—with preference given to "unemployed artisans in other Industries, preferably [but not necessarily] . . . employees whose trades have some affinity to the operations they will be required to perform." Journeymen were defined under the terms of the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924, which limited the right to enter labor negotiations to white and coloured workers only, as "a worker who has completed his contract of apprenticeship in any of the classes of work enumerated in sub-section (1) (a) of section 2 of this schedule, and is employed on any such classes of work, or any worker over the age of twenty-one years employed on any such classes of work." These classes included skilled positions as boilermaker, fitter and turner, bricklayer, carpenter, molder, welder, and other such jobs. Grade I operatives engaged primarily in supervisory work. See Government Notice no. 707, Government Gazette (May 7, 1937): 12–21. All these positions were occupied by w