Eddie Webster’s Contribution to Sociological Studies of Skill

Arguably the foundation of Eddie Webster’s scholarship in Sociology was based on his study of skills and the racialized division of labor in South Africa. As thoughts on the reconceptualization of skills formation in South Africa already started taking shape within the academic community by the late 1980s and early 1990s, Webster was already immersed in addressing questions of craft unionism, tacit skills, the notion of unskilled workers and the rise of industrial unionism. These perspectives were framed along the lines of arguing that the racial monopoly over skills held by whites needed to be challenged as it privileged white workers in the labor market directly privileging them in the wage structure. A critical issue was to challenge categories of unskilled and semi-skilled, which were attributed to black workers despite their being involved in a broad range of work that involved many skills. Webster’s work has addressed the range of issues that shape our understanding of the meaning of skill in the context of a racialized division of labor in South Africa. In his book Cast in Racial Mould (Ravan Press, 1983), Webster argued that the Marxian approach to the labor process among sociologists of labor ignored the bargaining power conferred on unskilled and semi-skilled workers when mechanization replaces craft skill. Webster’s work evolved throughout his career as he engaged questions of the post-apartheid changes to workplace orders; inequality; digitalization /platform economy; and rise of precariousness. These changes led Webster to revisit “old” questions of the changes in skills and the labor process in conditions of technological revolutions that influence the structure of the economy and the labor market. His last book Recasting Workers Power (Wits University Press, 2023) reflects on his analysis of change in the debates about the labor process and deskilling in the context of the “Digital Age”. This paper will engage Webster’s work by concentrating on: (1) global debates on skills; (2) the skills question in the context of a racialized division of labor in South Africa: from colonialism, apartheid and to the democratic era; (3) critically engage Webster’s contributions to the skills debate in South Africa; and (4) how Webster’s work can influence future studies of skills within South African Sociology.