Suchergebnisse

SUMMARY
The South African National Assembly recently passed amendments to the Labour Relations Act which will roll back the right to strike. This briefing will analyse the amendments, their implications and what they tell us about the state of the labour movement, the possibilities for trade union revival and the state working-class struggle in South Africa today.

On 1 January 2019 amendments to the Labour Relations Act came into force that significantly altered and curtailed the right to protected strike action in South Africa. Internationally, the right to strike has been eroded in recent years with many countries adopting legal provisions that violate the International Labour Organization's principles. Comparatively, the rights of South African workers to go on protected strikes remain better than many other places in the world, a reflection of the militant history of the South African labour movement. But the erosion of these rights, with the active support of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, should be a cause for concern for activists and labour scholars in South Africa and beyond. This article develops the Power Resources Approach to consider how union institutional power has entrenched neo-liberalism in South Africa. Grounding the analysis of institutional power within the analytical framework of corporatism allows this article to develop an analysis of institutional power that is attentive to class forces. This provides an avenue for understanding the "double-edged sword" of institutional power in the South African context in order to comprehend when and under what circumstances trade unions advance and defend the interests of the working class and when they defend those of capital. KEY WORDS: labour; neo-liberalism; institutional power; corporatism; South Africa

Purpose
The paper argues that the field of social movement studies has been dominated by a movement organisation-centric approach. This organisational bias has constrained the analysis of collective action, especially in the Global South. The purpose of this paper is to contribute towards a reconceptualization of social movements which links them not to organisations but understanding social movements as a praxis linked to the material experiences of everyday life. Furthermore, the paper uses this expanded definition of social movements to revisit debates about mobilising and organising through reference to the contemporary South African context.


Design/methodology/approach
The empirical findings of the paper are based on ethnographic, qualitative and quantitative research on collective action in South Africa that has been carried out by the author since 2009.


Findings
The paper presents three case studies of collective action which demonstrate the variability, strengths and weaknesses of different forms organising and mobilising in contemporary South Africa.


Originality/value
The paper contributes to re-conceptualising social movements in a way in which the concept is better able to travel across the Global North and South as a heuristic device. Furthermore, the paper situates debates about the strengths of mobilising with and without organisations within the South African context.

Comments on Luke Sinwell's "Is "Another World" Really Possible? Re-examining Counter-Hegemonic Forces in Post-Apartheid South Africa" (March 2011). Adapted from the source document.

South Africa is not typically mentioned in studies of recent global protest. But popular resistance surged in South Africa from 2009, reaching a peak of more than one protest per day in 2012. We examine the 2009+ South African protest wave, highlighting its sources, antecedents, primary features, and key consequences. Marked by an explosion of popular resistance in both communities and workplaces, we argue that the protest wave shares key features with recent protests elsewhere. Most importantly, they are propelled by forces of marketization and critique the failures of democracy. The protest wave had a major impact on South African politics, instigating the emergence of new challenges to the dominance of the Alliance between the African National Congress (ANC)—the ruling party—the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). But the current political trajectory is far from stable, and the future is remarkably uncertain.

South Africa's Incident Registration Information System (IRIS) is a comprehensive, computerised database maintained by the South African Police Service (SAPS). In principle, it records all public order policing activity including all crowd incidents. While IRIS data is, potentially, a unique source for protest event analysis, considerable care is required. We aim to correct misunderstandings about the data advanced by academics and in the media, and expose its misuse by police chiefs and politicians. In particular, the incidents that IRIS reports are not protests, though protests can be found in the raw data. This article is based, in part, on records of 156,230 incidents covering the period 1997-2013.