Labour Policies in Practices: Innovations, Resistances and a Timid Political Will of Reform
(2019) The Belgian Congo between the Two World Wars — ISBN: [978-90-75652-62-8], p. 191-210, published
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- This paper aims at offering an analysis of connected or global history of colonial policies on the social relations of labour and production; the philosophy of the human that accompanied them; colonial government and in particular the practices and modes of labour management by private actors and the state. It restores the history of labour in the Belgian Congo in a more general movement that affected Africa like other continents marked by colonization, by integrating a variation of scales (from the global to the local). The focus on the Belgian Congo, with its singularities in terms of labour and social relations, seeks to examine previous explanatory schemes from a new angle by privileging a logic of interconnection between spaces. The paper pays also considerable attention to the reactions of the local populations to these colonial policies (between submission and various kinds of resistances) and the interactions they produce among the actors. Thus the capacity of the local authorities and the colonized to act autonomously becomes a major key to understanding the system. In this perspective, if the context of the interwar years were not a real driver of change and did not lead to major social changes in the world of work, it revealed indications of emerging changes. Discourses slowly changed, welfare practices hardly began to appear in the private sector, and resistances on the part of the Africans prefigured the emergence of more organized movements. All these developments still remained embryonic or localized in this period and were impacted by the crisis of 1929 and then the war. Nonetheless, they give evidence of a certain autonomy of action on the part of the local actors, both colonizer and colonized, in the face the discourses, principles and colonial institutions impregnated with internal and external logic (the League of Nations). This led to a slow reversal of the power relations among the actors which, driven forward by the reformists, was to lead to major changes after 1945 in terms of legislation, industrial relations and the work conditions.
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Tilly, P. (2019). Labour Policies in Practices: Innovations, Resistances and a Timid Political Will of Reform. In Vanderlinden Jacques (eds) (ed.), The Belgian Congo between the Two World Wars (Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, p. p. 191-210). Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/94769