Labour reform sent structurally vulnerable white workers in search of new ways to safeguard their race and class interests in a rapidly changing world. This chapter examines how the MWU negotiated South Africa’s long transition to majority rule, from the late 1970s to the union’s centenary in 2002 when it was re-established as Solidarity. This period saw the trade union acquire new leadership, reposition itself as a social movement involved in labour and civil rights issues, and engage overtly in cultural politics. It also expanded its membership to include white-collar and professional workers. The discursive shifts accompanying these organisational changes reveal how expressions of entitlement, rights, and victimhood centred on citizenship, and experiences of loss, humiliation, anxiety, and a lack of recognition shifted from being expressed in terms of class to being expressed in terms of culture and race. Reflecting global shifts towards identity politics and civil society-based action, this facilitated the merger of white working-class responses to the dismantling of the racial state merged with the post-1994 ‘identity struggles’ of the white, specifically Afrikaner, minority. Hence the MWU’s ‘reinvention’ as the social movement Solidarity represented the merger of cross-class Afrikaner experiences and the formation of a new post-apartheid social alliance.

This chapter argues for a reinterpretation of the nature of white working-class privilege in twentieth-century South Africa. Presenting the structural and subjective formation of the white working class in the context of South Africa’s industrial and political development since the late nineteenth century, it shows that, rather than a labour aristocracy, white workers represented a privileged precariat – benefiting from the advantages bestowed by their white skin, but remaining precariously dependent on state benevolence to protect them from black labour competition. Challenging simplistic understandings of white embourgeoisement, it shows that, on the eve of the 1970s’ crisis of capital accumulation and liberation struggle, there remained a materially more vulnerable group of whites in South Africa. Their social position and political priorities were defined by their class position. The chapter introduces the whites-only Mineworkers’ Union, whose members exemplified this position of labour vulnerability concealed by race-based status. With this argument, the chapter lays the foundation for this book’s assertion that the shape and legacy of white working-class formation are crucial for understanding white workers’ responses to reform efforts from the 1970s and the subsequent dismantling of the racial state, presented in subsequent chapters.