Kenny, Bridget. 2020. “To protect white men: Job reservation in elevators in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s.” Social History 45(4): 500-521.
ABSTRACT
‘Job reservation’ bolstered apartheid state power in South Africa through affirming the status and class position of whites. Under Section 77 of the 1956 Industrial Conciliation Act, an industrial tribunal could be set up to investigate whether a particular occupation might be reserved by race. This article examines the debates surrounding the investigation into an unusual job category – that of the passenger lift attendant within the service sector – demonstrating that what was at stake were the intimacies of gender, sexuality and respectability that were also constitutive of class and race. The National Party was interested in protecting jobs for infirm and elderly white men, and the debate around job reservation in lift operation reveals the centrality of the concept of the white male breadwinner within state policy. However, employers and building owners insisted on the importance of service to the white public as an alternative logic, opening up the possibility of using not only white women’s labour but also automatic lift technology, undermining the very basis on which job reservation rested. Thus the article highlights the contradictory ideological work of job reservation – of protecting white men – in Johannesburg during the 1950s and 1960s.
