Mine migrancy in Zimbabwe and South Africa

Abstract

The New South Africa is currently wrestling with a mining system in which the bulk of the workforce is migrant, illiterate and classified as unskilled, earning low wages. The search is now on to overcome this legacy and develop a mining policy in keeping with a democratic South Africa.

From the Zimbabwean experience this paper derives lessons for South Africa. It demonstrates not only the complexity of dismantling the migrant labour system but also the persistence of many of its characteristics long after formal abandonment of a migrant labour policy, if the more fundamental structures of the industry's labour utilisation model, such as the continued reliance on cheap, unskilled labour, are not modified.