The Role of the ILO during and after Apartheid

The International Labour Organization (ILO) at times played an important role in challenging race discrimination in the workplace, both as apartheid legislation intensified and in the new democratic South Africa. The controversy around forced labor, and the participation of independent African countries in the ILO, ultimately led to the withdrawal of South Africa. Subsequently, ILO Conventions and the 1964 Declaration influenced the government to establish the 1978 Wiehahn Commission to examine industrial relations. Its recommendations led to extensive unionization. The ILO was initially reluctant to recognize the independent unions but subsequently worker organizational power led to its support. Later, it contributed to creating a post-apartheid workplace order. However, despite its intention to build an inclusive industrial relations system, many workers remain excluded from the regulatory framework and the labor movement. The ILO’s rigid binary between direct coercion on the one hand and the voluntary recruitment of workers on the other does not capture the continuity from slavery, indentured labor, and the migrant labor system through to use of casual labor in contemporary South Africa. The ILO seems more comfortable with traditional unions and clear-cut employer-employee relationships.

Making the Desert Bloom?

World War one witnessed the first dense flow of Indian labor into the Persian Gulf. To reconstruct the campaign in Mesopotamia/Iraq after the reverses of 1915-16, the Indian Army demanded non-combatants for dock-work, construction labor and medical and transport services. This chapter explores the Government of India’s anxious deliberations about the choice of legal form in which to meet this demand. The sending of labor for military work overseas had to be distanced conceptually from the stigmatized system of indentured labor migration. There was a danger of disrupting those labor networks across India and around the Bay of Bengal which maintained the supply of material goods for the war. Non-combatant recruitment took the war into new sites and spaces. Regimes of labor servitude were tapped but some form of emancipation had to be promised. The chapter focusses on seven jail- recruited Indian Labor and Porter Corps to explore the work regime in Mesopotamia. Labor units often insisted on fixed engagements rather than ‘duration of war’ agreements, but had to struggle for exit at the conclusion of their contract. After the Armistice, Britain still needed Indian labor and troops in Mesopotamia but sought to prevent the emergence of a settler population.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses about the Arabian Peninsula. This exceptionalism came to the fore in media and academic coverage of the “crisis” in the Gulf region. In general, the Gulf crisis was framed as a “diplomatic spat,” a spectacle marked by tropes of exceptionalism and Orientalism that diminished the importance of the Gulf region, its rulers, and, especially, the people who live there. These exceptionalist representations of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Qatar evacuate society of the social while rendering “culture” as fixed in timeless ideas of bedouins, Islam, indentured labor, and gender repression. This kind of history, politics, and culture writing erases the long and complex histories of class, anticolonial, and nationalist struggles that have marked the region as much as any other postcolonial context, and removes the agency and complex role of both citizens and noncitizens in forming the fabric of Gulf societies. This book then studies Gulf exceptionalism, assessing what it means to conduct ethnography in supposedly exceptional spaces.

Slave, Convict, and Indentured Labor and the Tyranny of the Particular

In Slave, Convict and Indentured Labor and the Tyranny of the Particular, distinguished historian Richard B. Allen draws on forty-five years of research on slavery and indentured labor in the Indian Ocean world and Asia to challenge scholars to look beyond the chronological, conceptual, and geographical confines of the specialized case studies that characterize research on slavery and related forms of migrant labor and situate their studies in more fully developed local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts. As this inaugural Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies demonstrates, the globality of European slave trading and abolitionism and the connections between the slave, convict, and indentured labor trades in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial world highlight the need to adopt more holistic approaches to studying the nature, dynamics, and impact of the human experience with slavery and cognate forms of forced labor in both the past and the present.

Concessionnaires et sous-traitants : Les intermédiaires chinois dans l’organisation du travail immigré en Malaisie, du début du XVIIIe au début du XXe siècle

Résumé Les formes de rémunération du travail immigré chinois dans le monde colonial sont très diversifiées. Elles ne peuvent être réduites à celles de l’indentured labor. Cette contribution se propose de mettre en lumière quelques-unes de ces formes, en étudiant une organisation qui combine travail à forfait et salariat, rémunération à la pièce et au rendement. Elle émerge au Sud de la Malaysia actuelle, dans l’archipel de Riau, au début du XVIIIe s., puis se déplace vers le Nord et connait une forme d’institutionnalisation lorsqu’elle atteint le Johor, au milieu du siècle suivant, avant de disparaître en 1919. Un entrepreneur, appelé le kangchu, presque toujours chinois, intermédiaire entre le travail et ses financiers chinois à Singapour ainsi qu’entre les cultivateurs et la tutelle administrative malaise, est la cheville ouvrière d’une organisation de la production agricole dont il garantit une forme de fluidité, idéale aux yeux de ses compatriotes immigrés, venus dans la région dans le but de repartir au pays le plus vite possible.