The issues surrounding labour, which comprise not simply the usual questions of the legal regulation of conditions of work, the labour contract, unions and wage levels, but also the ways in which this was done in a racially divided workforce, are perhaps the hardest to draw a ‘legal’ boundary around. They go to the heart of the nature of South African society, state and politics, and the legal discourses cannot be separated from the political. The problems of control of wages, the right to strike and the legal position of trade unions have in all industrial countries produced complex attempts at solution. In South Africa these have to be considered in a wider context – that of the use of law in these fields to impose an industrial colour bar. Labour issues were, in the years after 1902, the most violent and contentious in white politics. An account of the development of the divided regime of labour law is necessarily an account of this political struggle. Labour questions were central to the formation of the new South African state. The Milner regime in the Transvaal put the resources of the state behind the mobilisation of labour for the Rand mines. Unable to coerce African labour fast enough, his government imported Chinese labour for the mines. This fuelled the rise of the white Labour Party dedicated to the protection of white workers.