Unionization and employer strategy: the Tanganyikan Sisal lndustry, 1958-1964

Social scientists have placed too much reliance on the concept of trade union development as the main yardstick for measuring worker consciousness in colonial states. This has blurred the element of continuity present in the development of labor reaction to the different political and economic circumstances with which it has been confronted. This mistake has been made not only by writers and analysts of labor history, but also by certain sectors of colonial management in Tanganyika in the 1950s and 1960s who envisaged the domination and destruction of the nascent trade union movement as critical to the containment of worker militancy. The case study presented below deals with management reaction to the development of trade unionism in the sisal industry in Tanganyika. It describes the policy of the Tanganyika Sisal Growers Association (TSGA) to develop alternative institutions for consulting workers over specific work issues. The TSGA would not accept the inevitability of trade union development, as had the government. They still believed that they could find a substitute for it, which they could completely manipulate. The introduction of the Joint Consultative Councils (JCC) was an attempt to establish this alternative machinery.