Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2025
The conclusion to be drawn from Part I of this study is that craft workers resisted the process of deskilling and thus retained considerable control over the supply of labour at the level of the firm and the industry. Craft workers attempted to maintain the exclusivity of the trade well after technological change had rendered craft skill redundant by contesting the definition of skill. Colour and craft coincided, and the vulnerability created by the challenge from cheaper non-union black labour gave craft exclusivity a racial form. Craft workers, with institutional leverage in the industrial relations system, relied on this privileged access to entrench the exclusivity inherent within craft unions along lines similar to those described by Penn and discussed in Chapter 1. The result was the survival of a higher number of ‘craft’ jobs than the deskilling thesis would appear to indicate. This, it is suggested in Part II, was to contribute to a crisis of control in work relations in the 1970s.
In the early days of small-scale foundry production in South Africa employers were able to exercise authority directly on the shop floor, through the entrepreneur himself or through the craftsmen. During this phase, craft workers exercised a significant degree of control over the job through the closed shop and the apprenticeship system. In some respects these craft workers acted as the foremen in hierarchical control; for example, it was customary in early foundry production for craftsmen to hire their own ‘helpers’. But employers were able to break the control of the craftsmen by job fragmentation and deskilling, introducing what in Chapter 1 we called ‘technical control’. By the end of the 1960s a growing number of craftsmen had been transformed into supervisors performing a control function in the workplace.
As a consequence of this abdication of managerial authority to the supervisor, industrial relations had been a neglected managerial function in the foundry in the pre-Wiehahn period.
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