Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Ease of hiring/firing, collective-bargaining scope, minimum wage rigidity, temporary/permanent contract regulation.
On 16 August 2012 South African Police Service officers shot 34 striking Lonmin platinum miners at Marikana, following a wildcat strike by rock drill operators outside the recognised NUM bargaining structure. The event catalysed a structural shift in platinum-sector labour relations toward AMCU, a 2014 five-month platinum-sector strike, and erosion of the tripartite alliance's labour leg. The Farlam Commission (report 2015) found serious failings by SAPS and the mining companies. No single statute was enacted, but subsequent sectoral bargaining regimes and the 2017 National Minimum Wage policy trace partly to the rupture.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.