Imagine the noise of an ordinary pneumatic road drill. Then imagine using one of these lying on your back, in a confined space, perhaps a metre high and some two miles underground. The temperature reaches 50 degrees centigrade. You are breathing in constant dust, throughout a minimum eight hour shift, six days a week, while a white foreman shouts at you. You know that a rock burst can kill you at any moment - as it has done to over 50,000 workers doing your job over the last 100 years, and as it will do to at least 500 more this year. You are aware that staying on in this job for more than three years, you are virtually certain to contract miner's phthisis. You know all this but you have few options. There are some four to five million unemployed people in your country, and millions more in neighbouring countries who would take your job. You have to feed your family - whom you haven't seen for a year because the apartheid system forces them to stay in a bantustan. Without the money you send them each month they would starve. If you can begin to imagine these things, then you will get some idea of the coercion that shapes the daily lives of millions of South African workers, and also of what underpins the enormous wealth of the white minority in that country.
Black workers, the overwhelming majority of South Africa'a working class, suffer from super-exploitation that is directly related to their racial oppression. Deprived of their political rights, historically dispossessed of their land, accorded inferior, racially separate education and systematically oppressed in a thousand other ways by the white minority, black workers enter the labour market severely disadvantaged. South Africa's present apartheid economy is rooted in a system of racial oppression and gross inequality that goes back to the origins of industrialisation in South Africa.
The denial of political rights to the African majority and the granting of merely token rights to the rest of the black population, coupled with the rigid and complex system of controls over movement, residential and job-seeking rights are major factors in maintaining massive and systematic inequalities in South African society. Until recently, when the deepening crisis of apartheid affected the economy itself, economic enterprises in South Africa boasted a higher rate of profit than would be possible in other developed countries. Whites in South Africa enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world. Black workers, on the other hand, are bound into a system that enforces an extremely high level of exploitation. The economy is run in the interests of the white minority and the large number of multinational companies operating in South Africa. Apartheid is the political system of control that makes this possible.
The subjection of black workers in the system of apartheid dates back to the early years of colonial conquest and the subsequent formalisation of apartheid policy. The process reduced the black majority from largely self-sufficient independent farmers, successfully marketing their surplus in the 19th Century, to dispossessed aliens in their own country. Restricted to the severely overcrowded bantustans, where only poverty and unemployment thrive, African workers have been excluded from access to areas where the vast majority of resources (health, education, housing etc) and productive enterprises are located. Two-thirds of those living in the bantustans are landless and have therefore no means to support themselves or their families. A mere three per cent of the Gross Domestic Product was produced in the bantustans in 1975 and this has hardly increased since. Only by securing a job, could African workers acquire the temporary right of residence in white South Africa. Coloured and Indian workers, although subjected to marginally less vicious restrictions, are on the whole in a similarly desperate position.
The fierce struggle of black workers and their allies, and the needs of a changing economy, compelled the apartheid regime in 1985 to recognise the permanence of a small minority of Africans on the 87 percent of the land that makes up white South Africa. Even so, these workers must live in racially segregated townships in prescribed areas mostly located far from their places of work and subject to strict and oppressive controls. Despite the removal of the 'pass laws', the legacy of the past remains deeply entrenched and continues to be enforced by a complex system of laws relating to 'squatting' and 'trespass'.
In 1986 the average monthly earnings of an African worker were 28 percent of those of a white worker. Coloured and Indian workers earned 35 percent and 52 percent respectively of the monthly earnings received by whites. Enormous inequalities in pay and conditions of service between black and white workers are a result of apartheid policies and the tremendous pressure to acquire work at any price that they create. These inequalities are clarly visible in the two major sectors of the economy - mining and manufacturing industry.
In the mining industry in the early 1980s, whites earned an average of just under R1,300, while black workers received an average of R250. Mining remains the hub of the entire apartheid economy. The mines are owned by a very small number of corporations and receive substantial foreign investment. 90 percent of the labour force on the mines, which produce 70 percent of South Africa's export earnings, are black (88 percent African). The deep-level mining in extremely harsh conditions, is geared to maximum profits with subsequent super-exploitation of the labour force. Most of the workers on the mines are migrants from the bantustans and are recruited on one year contracts by state-controlled Employment Bureaus. They live in segregated single-sex hostels, organised and run along prison lines. Health and Safety precautions applied by managements are negligible.
The mines are one of apartheid's killing fields. 1983, the year the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was launched, was no exception; 604 miners were killed in the gold mines alone.
All who work shall be free to form trade unions, to elect their officers and to make wage agreements with their employers;
The state shall recognise the right and duty of all to work and to draw full unemployment benefits;
Men and women of all races shall receive equal pay for equal work;
There shall be a forty-hour working week, a national minimum wage, paid annual leave, sick leave for all workers and maternity leave of full pay for all working mothers;
Miners, domestic workers, farm workers and civil servants shall have the same rights as all others who work; Child labour, compound labour, the tot system and contract labour shall be abolished.
This is the second major sector of the economy and is growing fast. The difference in wages between white and black workers is again vast. According to 1981 official statistics, whites earned an average of around R1,200 while black workers took home an average of around R300 a month. Over and above this are huge inequalities in conditions of service relating to access to sick fund, pension, unemployment insurance and other benefits. Industry is highly concentrated in four major metropolitan regions which account for 88 percent of all industrial output.
The state is one of the largest employers in South Africa. However, rail, postal, municipal and public service workers are deprived of basic rights won by workers in mining and manufacture. They have thus had to wage fierce, bloody and as yet often unresolved battles to win recognition, better wages and improved working conditions. During 1987 real wages declined, following the state's imposition of a wage 'freeze', by between three and ten per cent. Thus, for example, while the demand from workers was a minimum living wage of R1,500 per month, wages in the SATS went down from an average R462 to R420. State-employed workers have also been particularly hard hit by Pretoria'a privatisation policy which threatens jobs as well as the small advances made in winning union rights.
This pattern of super-exploitation making for super profits is supported by the fact that employers can depend on an enormous pool of unemployed who are desperate for work. There is no certainty about just how many South Africans are unemployed but an academic at a prominent South African University recently estimated that between 4.1 and 5.3 million people were unemployed at the end of 1986 and this figure is rapidly increasing.
The vulnerability of workers, both work-seekers and those in employment, in this situation is greatly increased and partly explains the desperately low wages and poor working conditions of millions of black workers. In the farming sector, for example, in which one-and-a-half-million black workers are employed on white-owned farms, wages are as little as R10 to R23 per month.
Unemployment hits hardest at women workers. Three out of four unemployed job seekers are women. This situation too has its historical roots in the stringent controls on movement and the bantustan policy designed to keep unemployed African workers out of 'white South Africa'. African women, in desperation to escape imprisonment and starvation in the bantustans, have been forced to take the lowest-paying jobs with the worst conditions in service. Employers have, over the years, jumped at the chance to turn this desperate need to their own advantage.
Many of the workers on the farms are women, working often as migrant seasonal workers with their children labouring alongside them. The largest concentration of black women workers is however in domestic service (54 per cent). Here, as with farm workers, there is absolutely no legislative protection in the form of provisions for basic wages or working conditions. There are over 800,000 domestic workers in the homes of the white minority. The average wage is only around R30 a month, but some work in return for simply food and shelter. Domestic workers work an average of 61 hours a week, although many work longer. They may be dismissed at a moment's notice and there are no provisions for pension, sick leave, holiday pay or unemployment insurance.
Is there a special role for the working class in our national struggle? We have already referred to the special character of the South African social and economic structure. In our country - more than in any other part of the oppressed world - it is inconceivable for liberation to have meaning without a return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole. It is therefore a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact is to feed the root of racial supremacy and does not represent even the shadow of liberation.
Our drive towards national emancipation is therefore in a very real way bound up with economic emancipation. We have suffered mure than just national humiliation. Our people are deprived of their due in the country's wealth; their skills have been suppressed and poverty and starvation has been their life experience. The correction of these centuries-old economic injuries lies at the very core of our national aspirations.
We do not underestimate the complexities which will face a people's government during the transformation period nor the enormity of the problems of meeting economic needs of the mass of the oppressed people. But one thing is certain - in our land this cannot be effectively tackled unless the basic wealth and the basic resources are at the disposal of the people as a whole and not manipulated by sections or individuals, be they white or black.
This perspective of a speedy progression from formal liberation to genuine and lasting emancipation is made more real by the existence in our country of a large and growing working class whose class consciousness complement national consciousness. Its political organisations and the trade unions have played a fundamental role in shaping and advancing our revolutionary cause. It is historically understandable that the doubly-oppressed and doubly-exploited working class constitutes a distinct and reinforcing layer of our liberation ... Its militancy and political consciousness as a revolutionary class will play no small part in our victory and in the construction of a real people's South Africa.
Decades of defiance and resistance to apartheid laws and practices led by the ANC have included valiant attempts to build a strong trade union movement to defend workers. From the very first, workers have insisted that their struggle for better wages and working conditions is inseparable from the struggle for political change. Strong unions grew up in the teeth of vicious repression. Out of these attempts to build strong and united trade union organisation came the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU). From its inception in 1955, it has been an integral member of the liberation alliance headed by the African National Congress. SACTU maintained this stand even in the face of imprisonment, banning, harassment and murder of its activists. Eventually it was forced into exile along with the ANC in 1960. It has since played a major role in the building of a militant trade union movement.
Until 1979 African workers were excluded from the definition of 'employee' in all protective labour legislation and were also therefore excluded from all official bargaining machinery that set minimum wages and working conditions. They were not allowed to be directly represented in negotiations nor allowed to organise independently in unions. Trade union organisation had to be segregated according to race, and black branches of unions had to fall under the authority of the white branches.
After intense struggles in the factories from 1973 onwards, there was a defiant mushrooming of large, powerful, non-racial trade unions. The regime was forced on to the defensive. Having tried vainly to stamp out black trade unionism completely, it now attempted to cut its losses. Switching tactics, it hoped to weaken these militant unions by bringing them under complex and rigid official bargaining structures. The regime set requirements for 'recognition' that it hoped would bring the unions under control. Official structures for bargaining were not on the factory floor but in forums composed of representatives of employers and employees in any one industrial sector. The decisions of these forums on minimum wages and conditions would then be legislated for the industry as a whole. This was an attempt to remove bargaining (and therefore militancy and united action) from the factory floor. Active worker militancy would, they hoped, be replaced with toothless bureaucratism.
Only in 1973 were African workers, outside extremely broadly defined 'essential services', accorded the right to strike. But even this was largely technical and so restrictive as to be almost meaningless in practice. Picketing and vaguely defined 'incitement to strike' are still prohibited, as is financial support for striking workers.
Strike action is often met with instant dismissal and workers are forcibly evicted from their hostels, sent back to the bantustans and blacklisted by the employment bureaux through which workers are recruited. Bantustan authorities, many of whom have outlawed trade unions in their territories, co-operate in this and in the recruitment of scab labour.
With the inclusion in 1979 and 1981 of non-racial unions in legislation controlling unions, came increased repression and attacks on progressive unions and unionists. In 1981 alone, over 300 unionists were detained and at least 1,200 were charged in connection with their union activities.
Farm and domestic workers are still specifically excluded from even the minimal protection offered by the labour legislation, as are all workers employed in the bantustans.
Despite the harsh repression levelled against union organisation, the non-racial unions have managed to resist many of the attempts to curb their power and break their unity. They have grown rapidly in size and strength. The determination and high level of unity of black workers has sustained their preparedness to take industrial and political action in the face of these extreme conditions. The increasing difficulty of employers to find scab labour despite the desperate unemployment situation is further evidence of the heroic sacrifices black workers are prepared to make in their struggle to put an end to apartheid.
Background Paper on the Role of the Working Class Presented to the ANC Second National Consultative Conference Kabwe, Zambia, June 1985
The founding conference of SACTU in March 1955 boldly adopted the declaration that:
The future of the people of South Africa is in the hands of its workers. Only the working class, in alliance with other progressive-minded sections of the community, can build a happy life for all South Africans, a life free from unemployment, insecurity and poverty, free from racial hatred and oppression, a life of vast opportunities for all people.
The working class, as the most exploited and the most numerous class, should necessarily constitute the mass base of every democratic organisation. The leadership of such organisations in the course of the struggle must increasingly reflect the interests of the most oppressed and exploited people of our country - the working class and its allies.
The participation of the trade unions in the broad democratic struggles will deepen and extend the political consciousness of the workers and their role in the revolution. Distancing the trade unions from the mass democratic struggle hinders the political development of the workers. It is on this basis that SACTU, from its inception, continues to participate in the campaigns initiated by the Congress Alliance.
It is also for this reason that SACTU continues to call upon the trade unions and workers to participate in the mass democratic struggles, namely the anti-constitutional campaign, campaigns against repressive laws, campaigns against Bantu Education and against the reactionary features of the Labour Relations Amendment Act.
SACTU calls upon the workers and trade unions to join the broadest mass democratic organisations and fronts. SACTU continues and will continue to work with even those unions not affiliated to the United Democratic Front. We however urge them to work jointly with the UDF and its affiliates.
The leading role of the working class, now and in a future South Africa, will be assured to the extent that SACTU and the workers successfully participate in the Alliance and in the struggle for national liberation. We in SACTU are determined to ensure that workers play a leading role in the struggle and we are aware that this can only be assured by us through our participation, determination and consistency.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), formed in 1985, united 500,000 union members into one federation with the aim of building a single, united trade union centre along industrial lines. At the time of its 1987 Annual Conference, COSATU had grown to close on one million members organised into 12 industrial unions and represented by 1,438 worker delegates.
As the biggest and most powerful union grouping in South Africa, COSATU has come under the most intense attack from both employers and the apartheid regime. Its offices around the country have been raided, bombed, burnt and vandalised. Its officials and members have been arrested, detained, restricted, banned, threatened, attacked and murdered. Despite these attempts to crush it, COSATU has continued to grow in power, numbers and determination. The regime has finally resorted to new legislation designed to cripple the giant federation's ability to defend its members. In 1988, it placed severe restrictions on COSATU and at least 19 other organisations, prohibiting them from political activity in opposition to apartheid. In September 1988 the regime enacted the Labour Relations Amendment Act in the face of fierce opposition from unions and even some employers, who understand that it is a recipe for further major confrontations. The worst features of the new law include:
The attempts by the state to break the strength of the unions are intensifying at an alarming rates, whole buildings housing the offices of COSATU and its affiliates have been reduced to rubble by bombs, unionists have been shot and killed at meetings, officials of unions have been detained at the negotiating table and drastic new laws have been passed. This however has not and will not break the determination of the workers. 1988 saw an ever-increasing militancy on the labour front.
Profits from apartheid are not restricted to the white minority in South Africa. They are spread around the world among the ever-decreasing number of collaborators with apartheid. Even this dwindling number now feel the need to explain and justify their apartheid connection thanks to the growing international pressure built up by tireless anti-apartheid organisations. The reasoning of apartheid's allies that sanctions and disinvestment will hurt black workers and will not assist in bringing apartheid to an end is looking steadily thinner. South African workers have clearly stated that they are in favour of this action. At COSATU's last conference, the close-on-a-million membership voted overwhelmingly in favour of the call for full mandatory sanctions and disinvestment. The work of the National Liberation Movement, headed by the ANC, and of hundreds of thousands of anti-apartheid activists all over the world in spreading information on the criminal viciousness of the apartheid regime and the desperate situation of the majority has exposed these apologists for apartheid for what they are. It is precisely those governments who argue against applying full sanctions which have implemented them successfully against other countries. Their short-sighted policies of placing profits before people are increasingly seen by the citizens of those countries to be unacceptable.
Solidarity actions in the form of the collection of funds, political statements and resolutions, boycotts, the withdrawal of investments with an apartheid connection and pressures instituted by workers and their unions on governments and employers are increasing world wide. For instance, actions against the import of goods from or the export of goods to South Africa have been taken by workers in Australia, Finland and Canada, by Dunnes workers in Ireland, and British workers in Felixstowe, Harwich, Southampton and Liverpool.
Each new action in support of South Africa's black workers gives them further courage in their struggle and further isolates and pressurises the South African regime. Workers and supporters internationally have a very valuable contribution to make. Individuals and organisations wishing to lend their support should contact their nearest ANC or SACTU office to establish the most effective way this can be done. Strong union-to-union contacts have already been established through the offices of SACTU internationally. A recent example of the effectiveness of this contact was the campaign for the release of veteran trade unionist Harry Gwala which was actively supported by the National Union of Railwaymen in Britain and which ended in victory. Many other campaigns and struggles of South African workers have been directly supported by workers internationally and each solidarity action has made an invaluable contribution to the struggle against apartheid and to the cause of international working class solidarity.
In this coming period, the revolutionary contribution of the working class to the common struggle will be of even greater importance than in the past. The workers will have to raise their level of participation in all spheres of our struggle, at the workplace and in the community, in the political as in the military confrontation. The better to be able to carry out these tsks, we must work hard further to build and strengthen the democratic trade union movement. The unorganised workers must be drawn into the trade union movement and all the organised should unite under the umbrella of COSATU. As we have said in the past, we do not believe there can be any obstacles so formidable that they can act as a barrier blocking any democratic union from joining COSATU.
We salute the workers of our country, especially for the outstanding struggles they waged in the past year, among others, the May Day and Youth Day general strikes and the campaigns for the release of political prisoners and detainees. These actions confirmed the political maturity and the leading role of the workers. We must build on these gains, emphasising the unity of the working class, its forward role in our struggle and the need for it consciously to make the necessary sacrifices to secure the liberation of our people as a whole.
Under the conditions of contemporary South Africa, 87 percent of the land and 95 percent of the instruments of production of the country are in the hands of the ruling class, which is solely drawn from the white community. It follows, therefore, that constitutional protection for group rights would perpetuate the status quo and would mean that the mass of the people would continue to be constitutionally trapped in poverty and remain as outsiders in the land of their birth.
Finally, success of the constitution will be, to a large extent, determined by the degree to which it promotes conditions for the active involvement of all sectors of the population at all levels in government and in economic and cultural life.