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Negotiating Union. South Africa’s National Union of Mineworkers and the end of the Post-Apartheid Consensus
No full textBased on a case study of South Africa’s largest trade union – the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), this dissertation puts the current mining crisis in historical perspective. Beyond mining, it proposes keys to understand South Africa’s “negotiated” transformation from apartheid to democracy. It concludes that this country currently experiences what one can call the “end of the post-apartheid consensus;” a moment in which shared elitist conceptions of political and socioeconomic change developed during South Africa’s 1990s transition are starting to be decisively challenged.
Departing from the NUM’s early years, in apartheid’s last decade, it analyses the union’s trajectory as a mineworkers’ organisation after the end of white minority rule. Questioning NUM representations, in traditional struggle iconography, as a militant and revolutionary organisation, it argues that this union was also historically developed into a disciplined union, structured by and around strong core leadership. In other words, the main questions raised here are: how are we to understand, in time, tensions between militancy on the one hand, and organisation on the other hand? How are we to account in non-linear terms for the build up to the 2012 Marikana strike and massacre, in a democratic context in which labour relations had supposedly become less adversarial and more workers friendly? What, in the NUM’s organisational ethos, can help us understand what happened, not as if Marikana was the expression of fundamental and untenable contradictions – class betrayal by another name, but as the result of the sometimes unintended consequences of a nevertheless conscious and deliberate process aimed at organisation building and development?
The main hypothesis that is put to work here is that NUM founders strategically built a centralised and efficient organisation, in order to survive in the mines’ repressive environment. This, in turn, generated tensions, which were to remain, between the grassroots and the top of the organisation. In order to fulfil its organisational goals, the union also crucially invested in leadership development, at the expense of membership development. While claiming to be a socialist union that produced professional organisers and revolutionaries, the NUM nevertheless gave birth to professional negotiators who were more inclined towards negotiation than conflict. If the NUM achieved tremendous gains for workers through collective bargaining, the 2012 strikes and their aftermath have shown that mineworkers still aspire to militancy at the grassroots, and that they are ready to fight in order to “transform” the mining industry. This implies that the workers’ bread and butter demands are also rooted in more structural claims, which have gradually brought the “post-apartheid consensus,” which until 2012 prevailed as a shared narrative of how mining was to be democratised, into question.La Sapienza Università di Roma, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Institut des mondes africaines (Paris), French Institute of South Africa, Università Italo Frances
Utilizzo dei collettori solari parabolici lineari a concentrazione in centrali termoelettriche a vapore.
No full textDETECTION OF LOW-ENERGY NEUTRAL ATOMS IN THE PLANETARY ENVIRONMENTS
No full textMicrochannel Plates (MCP) detectors are frequently used in space instrumentation for detecting a wide range of radiation and particles. The capability to detect non-thermal low energy neutral species is crucial for the ELENA (Emitted Low-Energy Neutral Atoms) sensor, which is part of the SERENA package (Search for Exospheric Refilling and Emitted Natural Abundances) on board the MPO spacecraft of the BepiColombo mission of ESA to Mercury, which is scheduled for launch in August 2015. ELENA is a Time of Flight (TOF) sensor, based on a novel concept using an ultra-sonic oscillating shutter (Start section) and MCP detector (Stop detector). The ELENA scientific objective is to monitor the emission of neutral atoms from the surface of Mercury by detecting energetic neutral atoms in the range 10 eV – 5 keV, within 76° FOV, perpendicular to the S/C orbital plane. The surface is scanned thanks to the spacecraft motion. In particular, processes of particle release from the surface will be investigated by identifying particles released via solar wind-induced ion sputtering (with energies > 1eV – < 100 eV) as well as energetic Hydrogen atoms, which are back-scattered solar wind protons, at energies of hundreds eV.
MCP absolute detection efficiency for very low energy neutral atoms (E < 30 eV) is a crucial point for this investigation. At the MEFISTO facility of the University of Bern, measurements on three MCP with different coatings have been performed providing the first data of MCP detection efficiencies in the energy range 10eV – 1keV
Misure GPS in radio occultazione per lo studio dell'atmosfera neutra: la missione ROSA su OCEANSAT-2
No full textRappresentazioni spaziali, orientamento e navigazione: studi funzionali e comportamentali ed una proposta neuro-funzionale
No full textSVILUPPO DI UN MODELLO INTEGRATO DI GOVERNO CLINICO IN UN CENTRO DI CARDIOCHIRURGIA PEDIATRICA DI III LIVELLO
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