It is with great sadness that ROAPE marks the passing of Eddie Webster last week. Eddie was a giant of both South African labour sociology and global labour studies. Alex Beresford and Mattia Dessi offer some brief reflections on his influence on them as international researchers of labour politics.
By Alex Beresford and Mattia Dessi
Alex Beresford: To me, Eddie was the embodiment of activist-scholarship. This meant working with unions, including workers’ education and the establishment of worker-focused publications, such as the influential South Africa Labour Bulletin. Indeed, the tributes that have poured in from representatives of the labour federation, COSATU, as well as left-wing activists and journalists alike are testament to this critical element of Eddie’s reach beyond the walls of the university.
As captured brilliantly by his colleague, Andries Bezuidenhout (University of Fort Hare), “Eddie was an institution builder par excellence” and this was reflected in the role he played in the formation of the Sociology of Work Project (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand and later the Global Labour University for trade unionist education.
William Gumede, one of the leading political analysts in South Africa today notes that Eddie was a “towering intellectual” who “nurtured generations of black sociologists” through the founding of such institutions. As Bezuidenhout observes about Eddie’s work in this regard, “To build institutions and movements, you have to build people, and this is maybe the most radical thing anyone can invest their time in.”
Eddie’s activism was also reflected in his engaged approach to supporting fellow academics. As labour scholar Carin Runciman (Edinburgh) notes, “There are hundreds, possibly even thousands, of us who benefited from his engagement, mentorship and guidance to undertake critical work in the service of labour and social movements.”
Indeed, my own experience of him was of a welcoming, generous and compassionate scholar committed to building a wider institutional architecture that created spaces for others to grow.
It was a commitment Eddie sustained beyond retirement. I recently enjoyed lunch with him where he reflected on his latest book, Recasting Workers’ Power: Work and Inequality in the Shadow of the Digital Age in which he once again demonstrated his prowess in marrying detailed empirical insights into the ever-changing world of employment relations with thoughtful theoretical interventions in global labour debates.
This continued desire to engage and lead debates was built into the DNA of his profile as an activist scholar who remained active into his final days – as has been noted widely on social media in response to the shock at his passing.
On a personal level, Eddie’s work was an inspiration to me through my studies and beyond. I believe Eddie coined the term “Social Movement Unionism” (SMU) to denote the significance of the strategies and tactics employed by COSATU back in the struggle against apartheid. He recognised that SMU reflected an important understanding of workers in South Africa that their struggles for justice and emancipation in the workplace could not be divorced from the wider political struggle against the apartheid state. This helped spark global debates about SMU and union revitalisation in an era of neoliberal globalisation – a debate that Eddie remained central to in his extensive body of work.
It is a debate that remains perhaps as salient as ever today. Workers in South Africa, like their counterparts elsewhere, confront the challenges posed by the fourth industrial revolution and the transition to low-carbon economies. These will generate the most significant social, political and economic upheavals in recent history. It calls upon all students of labour to sustain the traditions of activist scholarship so brilliantly personified by Eddie.
Alex Beresford writes on political struggles over inequality, power and corruption and conflict resolution and climate change. Alex is also an Associate Professor in African Politics and Director of Research and Innovation for POLIS at the University of Leeds.
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Mattia Dessi: I first discovered Eddie’s work as a Masters student when I was initially considering the idea of focusing on South Africa. It would not be an exaggeration to say that his work played a great part in my decision to pursue that path. The way which he was able to present to the reader rigorous analysis of dynamic social processes has been, I believe, a great source of inspiration not only for me but for many other young students of different generations.
Eddie’s ability to combine theoretical insights with detailed empirical evidence has always been one of his many academic skills, and there is no better book, in my opinion, where this transpires than the classic Cast in a Racial Mould (1985). The book encapsulated Eddie’s talent as a qualitative researcher while also showing his knowledge of international theoretical debates. But most of all, it showcases a recurrent theme in his work: the attempt to connect international scholarship with the rich tradition of South African labour studies. A connection that was made, however, not from the position of someone passively adopting theoretical concepts crafted elsewhere, but instead based on the awareness that a critical revaluation of these theoretical debates from a South African viewpoint was necessary.
I visited South Africa for fieldwork at the end of 2022. Eddie’s work has shown, among other things, the importance of interviews and participant observation as a necessary part of a researcher’s attempt to understand the world, but it also showed the difficulties that this process sometimes involves. It was not long after I landed in Johannesburg that I started to feel pessimistic about the possibility of gathering the data I was looking for. Until that point my correspondence with Eddie had been limited to a few email exchanges and interactions at online conferences, yet he showed no hesitation when I contacted him asking for help. Despite being officially retired by then, we had lunch together and he asked a lot of questions about my research, never stopping from writing down notes, while also explaining what his current research interests were. The same afternoon he had already put me in touch with people who could help with my fieldwork.
I was glad to see him at a following Southern Centre for Inequality Studies seminar where I presented some preliminary results of my fieldwork. Needless to say, he wasn’t short of questions and comments.
It was with great sadness that I discovered on Wednesday 6 March that the seminar was the last time I enjoyed his intellectual brightness. For young scholars like me, and I’m sure for many more to come, he will always be a source of inspiration. Not only for his academic work, but also, and perhaps even more, for the way he selflessly put his knowledge at the service of the labour movement.
Mattia Dessi joined the University of Leeds in 2019. His work revolves around the world of work, trade unionism and Marxist theory with a focus on the mining industry in South Africa and the interrelation between technological change, organisational health and safety and political economy.
To access a few of Eddie Webster’s articles in ROAPE please click here and here.
