Class and culture in the workplace: East London, industrialisation, and the conflict over work, 1945–1957

Abstract

This paper attempts, through a closer examination of early industrialisation in East London, to re‐assess notions of ‘cheap native labour’ and its impact on class and culture in the workplaces of the city in the 1940s and 1950s. In particular, it seeks to amplify concerns of the dynamic complexity of working‐class formation in this period, and suggests the need to historicize, and problematise these processes beyond more typically represented understandings in South African historiography. The paper is divided into four main sections, and moves from a general economic overview of the city in the period, through conflicts and contradictions existant within employers, and racially divided white workers, to a closer examination of the impacts on, and shaping capacities of, black workers out of the domains of work and migrancy. It is argued this changing ‘material experience’ was central to redrawing economic structures, and shaping worker identities in historically and regionally specific ways, and concludes with a suggested implication for explaining the nature of East Londons industrialisation as ‘dependent’.