The Routledge Companion to Employment Relations

26

Employment relations in Africa

Pauline Dibben and Geoffrey Wood

Introduction

There is a very extensive body of literature on the hard times experienced across many African states in the 1980s and 1990s, and the subsequent commodity-fuelled recovery. However, the bulk of this literature has been orientated toward examining the role of the state, investors, business and civil society. In contrast, the coverage of the effects of these changes on employees and how the employment relationship has been altered is much less extensive, with the predominant focus on individual country case studies. This chapter provides an overview of employment relations (ER) across the continent, but focuses on the relatively developed economies of southern Africa. ...