Abstract

"'On our terms': Economic Sanctions and a Vision for the Post-Apartheid Workplace"

Mattie Webb, Virginia Military Institute (mattiecwebb@gmail.com)

By the mid-1980s, American debates over the politics of disinvesting from apartheid South Africa reached a decisive turning point. Reformist alternatives to sanctions had lost credibility—especially after President Reagan embraced them as part of constructive engagement. South Africa’s 1985 State of Emergency, marked by mass arrests and military repression, only deepened resistance from within the country. It also pushed Washington to pass long-debated economic sanctions legislation in 1986. This paper adds a worker-centric context to existing work on U.S.-imposed economic sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Historians and international relations scholars often cite the South African case as an example of the successful implementation of economic sanctions, arguing that such measures significantly accelerated the end of apartheid rule. But the focus on sanctions tends to obscure a confluence of other factors that contributed to apartheid’s demise and similarly conceals the ways sanctions did not go far enough, often leaving workers themselves behind. The withdrawal of multinational companies was often messy. Thus, given the challenges of disinvestment and the myriad loopholes in the sanctions themselves, I argue that the symbolic anti-racism that sanctions came to represent was more meaningful than their practical effects. This paper teases out the many nuances surrounding the movement for economic sanctions and the debates they provoked. It does so through examining the on-the-ground impact of sanctions, including how South African trade unions and federations navigated the changing context of the multinational space. It also compares this to how companies, unions, and workers in Namibia experienced the political and material effects of sanctions.