The "Double-edged Sword" of Institutional Power: COSATU, Neo-liberalisation and the Right to Strike
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 1 January 2019 amendments to the Labour Relations Act came into force that significantly altered and curtailed the right to protected strike action in South Africa. Internationally, the right to strike has been eroded in recent years with many countries adopting legal provisions that violate the International Labour Organization’s principles. Comparatively, the rights of South African workers to go on protected strikes remain better than many other places in the world, a reflection of the militant history of the South African labour movement. But the erosion of these rights, with the active support of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, should be a cause for concern for activists and labour scholars in South Africa and beyond. This article develops the Power Resources Approach to consider how union institutional power has entrenched neo-liberalism in South Africa. Grounding the analysis of institutional power within the analytical framework of corporatism allows this article to develop an analysis of institutional power that is attentive to class forces. This provides an avenue for understanding the “double-edged sword” of institutional power in the South African context in order to comprehend when and under what circumstances trade unions advance and defend the interests of the working class and when they defend those of capital. KEY WORDS: labour; neo-liberalism; institutional power; corporatism; South Africa
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".