Policy, practice and perception: Reconsidering the efficacy and meaning of statutory job reservation in South Africa, 1956–1979

Building on a long history of racially discriminatory labour practices, South African governments instituted statutory job reservation through the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924, and extended its scope through Section 77 of its successor Act in 1956. Section 77, which provided for direct government intervention in reserving certain occupations for specific racial groups, attracted widespread condemnation from apartheid critics throughout its tenure, and has been vilified in the historiography as one of the cornerstones of racial discrimination in apartheid South Africa. This paper evaluates contradictions between the application of the job reservation policy in practice and its perceived power amongst sections of organized labour. We contribute to the discussion on job reservation in South Africa in two ways: first, by assessing the actual impact of Section 77 on racial employment practices, and second, by examining the reaction of certain groups of organized labour to efforts to scrap the policy from the late-1970s. It shows that the impact of job reservation determinations in the period 1956 to 1979 was very limited in practice–yet a number of constellations of minority workers strongly defended the policy because of the perceived protection it offered them as workers vulnerable to competition from African labour. We conclude that, in this sense, Section 77 primarily provided symbolic rather than actual job protection to organized labour.