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In the early Transvaal, Sammy Marks's Hatherley Distillery held a government concession and sold cheap spirits that mine owners welcomed. Liquor drew African migrant workers to the Rand and recycled their wages. The ban did not end drinking; it created an illicit liquor trade run by syndicates and sustained by bribed police.
An industry's stance on vice follows its labour needs rather than any moral principle. Alcohol and similar indulgences are encouraged while they help recruit workers and recapture wages. They are banned once they threaten labour discipline and output. Moral legislation therefore often marks a shift in what employers need from workers, not a shift in public ethics.
Read laws against prostitution and 'immorality' against the population they govern. In a boom town dominated by single men, commercial sex was tolerated as a service to the workforce. As settled working-class families and a respectable middle class took shape, they demanded suppression. Enforcement then fell hardest along racial lines, so policing sex became a tool for ordering class and race in the city.
Zulu migrant men known as the AmaWasha ran a self-organised, guild-like laundry trade on the Witwatersrand, washing the city's clothes in its streams. Two forces broke their independence and pushed them into wage labour or out of the trade. Capital-intensive steam laundries undercut them, and the municipality used sanitary regulations to force them off urban water sources and onto remote sites.
Small independent operators in an industrialising city are rarely displaced by market competition alone. Municipal authorities finish the job through licensing, sanitation rules, zoning and public enterprises. Johannesburg's municipal electric trams, introduced in 1906, ruined the mostly poor-white horse-cab drivers. The loss of livelihood produced lasting class grievances that later fed working-class and ethnic politics.