AFRICA: Africa World Press Guide

compiled and edited by WorldViews

LABOR'S ROLE IN AFRICA
Policies, laws, and practices

An examination of labor's role in Africa takes us into an area of study wherein the boundary lines are not as sharply drawn as they are in the case of topics like refugees, food and agriculture, and African literature. Issues germane to the subject of labor's role in Africa include the position of labor in the new world economy, the state of industrialization and the manufacturing sector in African economies, broad labor-related issues such as unemployment, work and family, and the r ole of trade unions in Africa.

Globalization and worker rights

Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up (Brecher and Costello 1994) offers a readable and relatively compact introductory survey of the role of work and workers in the new world economy. "All over the world," au thors Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello write, "people are being pitted against each other to see who will offer global corporations the lowest labor, social, and environmental costs. Their jobs are being moved to places with inferior wages, lower business taxes, and more freedom to pollute. Their employers are using the threat of 'foreign competition' to hold down wages, salaries, taxes, and environmental protections and to replace high-quality jobs with temporary, part-time, insecure, and low-quality jobs ." A study of labor's role in Africa needs to be set against the background of the global economic and social issues raised and discussed in Global Village or Global Pillage.

Other books that analyze labor-related issues on a global level include

Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (Barnet and Cavanagh 1995);
Solidarity Across Borders: U.S. Labor in a Global Economy (Midwest Center for Labor Research 1989);
A Changing International Division of Labor (Caporaso 1987);
International Labour and the Third World: The Making of a New Working Class (Boyd et al. 1987);
The New International Labour Studies: An Introduction (Munck 1988); and
Trade Unions and the New Industrialization of the Third World (Southall 1988).

Global Dreams is the most popularly accessible book on this list.

World Labour Report, produced annually by the International Labour Organization (Geneva 1995), includes Africa in its survey of topics such as employment, working conditions, labor relations, social protection, and the rights of working men and women. The statistical tables at the back of each issue of the report provide country-specific data (noticeably spotty in many cases) for each African nation.

Two other useful reference resources on the subject of international labor are The Third World Worker in the Multinational Corporation: A Bibliography (Nordquist 1993) and World Employment 1995: An ILO Report (International Labour Office 1995).

Labor in Africa

The lines of the debate about the role of industry and of the manufacturing sector in Africa's development are clearly articulated in chapter 6 in Hemmed In: Responses to Africa's Economic Decline (Callaghy and Ravenhill 1993): "The future of the m anufacturing sector in Sub-Saharan Africa," by Roger Riddell. Riddell writes: "The strong contrasts between the emphasis given to the role of manufacturing within Africa by African governments and their advisers, its virtual absence in policy debate emana ting from outside Africa, and the, at best, minimal treatment of manufacturing in structural adjustment programs (SAPs), all raise a series of questions for African development in the 1990s." The resolution of these contending points of view on Africa's i ndustrial development will obviously have a direct impact on Africa's working people.

Kwamina Panford's study, African Labor Relations and Workers' Rights: Assessing the Role of the International Labor Organization (1994), narrows the focus even further. What is the role of organized labor (unions) in African development? Panford asks. Should workers be encouraged (or forced) to give up their rights to organize, to bargain collectively with employers, and to strike, if it is thought that the exercise of these labor-union rights might impede industrial development? Panford uses th e relatively rich labor environment of Ghana as a case study. His particular concern is the role and influence of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in the determination of policies, laws, and practices that affect workers' rights in Africa.

Historian Frederick Cooper's 120-page article, "Africa and the World Economy," in Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America (Cooper et al. 1993) looks at labor in Africa in the broader context of the capitalist world system and in the theoretical writings of scholars such as André Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Walter Rodney, and Immanuel Wallerstein.

Jean-Pierre Lachaud's research study, The Labour Market in Africa (Lachaud 1994) summarizes the findings from six African countries on the structuring of the urban labor market and its relationship with poverty and analyzes the relationships bet ween structural adjustment and the labor market. Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Madagascar, and Mali are the subjects of Lachaud's investigation.

In The Social History of Labor in the Middle East (Goldberg 1996) seven social historians study the roots and characteristics of working-class organizing in Turkey, Iran, Syria, Israel, Egypt, and the North Africa region.

Issues

Child labor:

Dance Civet Cat: Child Labour in the Zambezi Valley (Reynolds 1991); First Things First in Child Labour: Eliminating Work Detrimental to Children (Bequele and Myers 1995).

Migrant labor:

Forced Labour and Migration: Patterns of Movement within Africa (Zegeye and Ishemo 1989);

Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Labourers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860-1910 (Harries 1994);

Labour Export Policy in the Development of Southern Africa (Paton 1995);

Crossing Boundaries: Mine Migrancy in a Democratic South Africa (Crush and James 1995).

Women's labor rights:

Women and Work in Developing Countries: An Annotated Bibliography (Ghorayshi 1994);
Black Women Workers: A Study in Patriarchy, Race and Women Production Workers in South Africa (Meer 1991);
Post Abolished: One Woman's Struggle for Employment Rights in Tanzania (Mukurasi 1991);
Working Women: International Perspectives on Labour and Gender Ideology (Redclift and Sinclair 1991);
Women, Employment, and the Family in the International Division of Labour (Stichter and Parpart 1990);
Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900-1980 (Berger 1992);
Seeds 2: Supporting Women's Work Around the World (Leonard 1995).

Country studies

Cameroon:: Labour Resistance in Cameroon: Managerial Strategies and Labour Resistance in the Agro-Industrial Plantations of the Cameroon Development Corporation (Konings 1993).
Ethiopia:: Work and Power in Maale, Ethiopia (Donham 1994).
Ghana:: African Labor Relations and Workers' Rights: Assessing the Role of the International Labor Organization (Panford 1994); Trade Union Resource Guide (Transnationals Information Exchange 1993).
Mozambique:: African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenço Marques, 1877-1962 (Penvenne 1995).
Nigeria:: Labour in the Explanation of an African Crisis. A Critique of Current Orthodoxy: The Case of Nigeria (Adesina 1994); The Trades Union Movement in Nigeria (Otobo 1995).
Sudan:: Slaves into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in Colonial Sudan (Sikainga 1996).
Tanzania:: Poverty, Class, and Gender in Rural Africa: A Tanzanian Case Study (Sender and Smith 1990).
Tunisia:: Tunisia: Rural Labour and Structural Transformation (Radwan et al. 1991); Chapter 3 in The Labour Market in Africa (Lachaud 1994).

Labor in South Africa

The ANC and Black Workers in South Africa, 1912-1992: An Annotated Bibliography (Limb 1993)
Beyond Apartheid: Labour and Liberation in South Africa. (Fine and Davis 1990)
Black Women Workers: A Study in Patriarchy, Race and Women Production Workers in South Africa (Meer 1991)
Crossing Boundaries: Mine Migrancy in a Democratic South Africa (Crush and James 1995).
Hlanganani: A Short History of COSATU. 1991. 30-minute videotape available from AFSC Film Library (Cambridge).
The Independent Trade Unions, 1974-1984. Ten Years of the South African Labour Bulletin (Maree 1987)
Manufacturing Militance: Workers' Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970-1985 (Seidman 1994)
The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843-1900 (Atkins 1993)
Power! Black Workers, Their Unions, and the Struggle for Freedom in South Africa (MacShane et al. 1984)
South African Workers Speak (Tørres 1995)
Striking Back: A History of COSATU (Baskin 1991)
Yours for the Union: Class and Community Struggles in South Africa (Hirson 1990)
Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900-1980 (Berger 1992).

All of the labor-related issues discussed above are covered regularly in the Review of African Political Economy. See, especially, the September 1987 edition of the magazine, entitled Workers, Unions and Popular Protest (Baylies and Cohen 1987). ROAPE's diskette-based index--"RIX"--can be used profitably to identify labor-related articles in back issues of the quarterly. Contact the publisher for details.

Other labor-oriented periodicals of note are International Labour Documentation (Geneva); Labour, Capital and Society (Montreal); South African Labour Bulletin (Johannesburg); and World of Work: The Magazine of the ILO (Gene va).

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