The Introduction presents the book’s central historiographical and analytical argument – that a focus on white workers facilitates a critical examination of class alongside race, as historically contingent social phenomena, in late and post-apartheid South Africa. This contributes a view from the South to international debates on identity and inequality in the context of late capitalism. South Africa boasts a rich historical scholarship on white working-class lives in the early twentieth century. Yet when it comes to the apartheid and post-apartheid periods, white workers and considerations of class are largely absent. This results in a homogenising view of white society – a scholarly blind spot reflecting not only the widespread acceptance of ideas surrounding apartheid-era white embourgeoisement, but also the ‘death’ of class analysis and the dominance of identity debates. This book returns class to analytical prominence alongside race. In contrast to dominant ‘elite transition’ views, it introduces the idea of a ‘long transition’ from the 1970s, as labour reform heralded the dismantling of the racial state and adoption of neoliberal policies. Breaking away from parochial exceptionalism, this places South Africa within the recent history of capitalism and contributes to international debates on the consequences of global structural shifts since the 1970s.

By the 1970s, the National Party (NP) maintained its social contract with conservative white labour and commitment to the protection of white working-class interests that had brought it to power in 1948. Yet as the decade brought economic and political turmoil, the NP defied working-class interests by moving to reform the race-based labour dispensation. Going beyond conventional historical explanations, the chapter argues that this shift was not simply a function of the changing nature of the NP’s support base and priorities. Rather, the move towards reform marked important changes in the local political imaginary and mirrored global shifts in the relations between states, labour, and capital in this period. This chapter employs parliamentary debates, media reports and sources from the secretive Afrikaner Broederbond to examine the changing politics surrounding white labour amid the 1970s’ emerging crisis. It demonstrates that the plight and power of white labour were central preoccupations shaping the political elite’s response to the crisis. Observing widespread labour unrest in countries including Britain, they were adamant that trade unions such as the Mineworkers’ Union be made subservient to the ‘national interest’. This saw the NP abandon its long-standing commitment to the protection of white workers.

Labour reform sent structurally vulnerable white workers in search of new ways to safeguard their race and class interests in a rapidly changing world. This chapter examines how the MWU negotiated South Africa’s long transition to majority rule, from the late 1970s to the union’s centenary in 2002 when it was re-established as Solidarity. This period saw the trade union acquire new leadership, reposition itself as a social movement involved in labour and civil rights issues, and engage overtly in cultural politics. It also expanded its membership to include white-collar and professional workers. The discursive shifts accompanying these organisational changes reveal how expressions of entitlement, rights, and victimhood centred on citizenship, and experiences of loss, humiliation, anxiety, and a lack of recognition shifted from being expressed in terms of class to being expressed in terms of culture and race. Reflecting global shifts towards identity politics and civil society-based action, this facilitated the merger of white working-class responses to the dismantling of the racial state merged with the post-1994 ‘identity struggles’ of the white, specifically Afrikaner, minority. Hence the MWU’s ‘reinvention’ as the social movement Solidarity represented the merger of cross-class Afrikaner experiences and the formation of a new post-apartheid social alliance.

In 1977, the NP appointed the Wiehahn Commission to investigate the reform of the apartheid labour legislation. This chapter represents the first extensive utilisation of the Commission’s documentation for historical research, providing new insights into issues of race, labour, and citizenship in the late apartheid state. It shows that white organised labour was at the forefront of the investigation, with unions testifying before and workers’ representatives serving on the Commission. Exposing the limitations of existing race-focused scholarship which views white labour as homogeneous and reform as a ‘scheme’ to safeguard white supremacy, it shows that reform was not in the interest of lesser-skilled whites whose position relied on the rightlessness of black labour. Granting industrial citizenship to Africans undermined the established convergence between rights and race. While the redesign of labour relations had little impact on middle-class and elite whites, for white workers it marked the beginning of the long transition: more than a decade before the end of apartheid, labour reform amounted to the withdrawal of state support for working-class whiteness and initiated the dismantling of white workers’ racially privileged citizenship.

This chapter returns to white workers’ voices. Drawing on interviews with men who entered blue-collar work and joined the MWU before or during the Wiehahn reforms, it demonstrates the persistence of proud working-class identification, the presence of deep ambivalence around race and whiteness, and working-class resentment towards wealthy Afrikaners. This contradicts the simplistic racial tropes, naturalisation of ethnic identity, and denial of class in the Solidarity Movement’s official framing. At the same time, the union veterans display deep commitment to the Movement and its ideals in the face of the loss of past certainties, perceptions of social decline, personal vulnerability, and anxiety about the future they perceive. This sees them subjected to pressure from the leadership to manage Solidarity’s race- and culture-based membership on the ground. Together, the men’s counternarratives, ambivalences, and vulnerabilities demonstrate the specificity of blue-collar subjectivities and workplace experiences. In this way, the testimonies presented in this chapter expose the persistent reality of class otherwise not readily visible within the white, Afrikaner population, and provide striking insight into how white workers experienced and sought to negotiate the demise of the racial state.

This chapter argues for a reinterpretation of the nature of white working-class privilege in twentieth-century South Africa. Presenting the structural and subjective formation of the white working class in the context of South Africa’s industrial and political development since the late nineteenth century, it shows that, rather than a labour aristocracy, white workers represented a privileged precariat – benefiting from the advantages bestowed by their white skin, but remaining precariously dependent on state benevolence to protect them from black labour competition. Challenging simplistic understandings of white embourgeoisement, it shows that, on the eve of the 1970s’ crisis of capital accumulation and liberation struggle, there remained a materially more vulnerable group of whites in South Africa. Their social position and political priorities were defined by their class position. The chapter introduces the whites-only Mineworkers’ Union, whose members exemplified this position of labour vulnerability concealed by race-based status. With this argument, the chapter lays the foundation for this book’s assertion that the shape and legacy of white working-class formation are crucial for understanding white workers’ responses to reform efforts from the 1970s and the subsequent dismantling of the racial state, presented in subsequent chapters.