History has shown that trade union and workers' struggles against racial capitalism in South Africa must be non-racial and political if they are to be forces for progressive change. Any basic compromise on either of these principles can only lead to sectoral opportunism (along colour lines) or reformism, or both - i.e. a type of trade unionism that suits the interests of the employers and the state rather than the united class interests of all who sell their labour power for a wage.
Against all the odds, black workers have fought their definition as "units of labour" throughout this century. Despite wave after wave of state repression, trade unions emerged and reemerged to advance the collective demands and aspirations of the black working class. The purpose of this brief section is to outline the major developments in this rich history of black workers' resistance.
[Many books and articles have been written on the history of South African trade unionism. Two in particular that focus on the general history of black trade unionism are: H.J. and R.E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850-1950, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1969; and Luckhardt and Wall, op.cit. See bibliographic notes below for additional titles.]
The first widespread effort to organize black workers came with the rise of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa (ICU) during the 1920s. Although characterized by numerous inconsistencies at the political level, and at times guided by highly opportunistic and undemocratic leaders, the ICU established an important tradition of collective action and organizing experience for an estimated 100,000 black workers during this decade. The relevance of trade unions as institutions to advance the struggle against class exploitation became a part of the black workers' consciousness as a result of the ICU. Many sons and daughters of ICU members were in the forefront of non-racial trade unionism in the 1940s and 1950s.
Following the collapse of the ICU in the late 1920s, there emerged a second era of organizing black, particularly African, workers along the path of industrial unionism. Whereas the ICU had mobilized the oppressed into general workers' unions, the middle years of the next decade witnessed the rise of unions more responsive to workers' grievances and demands at the point of production. The strategy was to organize industry by industry in each area, with the ultimate goal of creating strong, national trade unions.
Progressive political organizations (especially the Communist Party of South Africa, CPSA) and individuals fought the IC Act of 1924 and the white trade union movement that for the most part wanted to exclude African workers from unions altogether, or at least prevent "mixed" unions where everyone had equal status. In each region of the country strong, if often small, trade unions of black workers gained valuable experience and confidence in the years preceding the war. Although the strategies for achieving non-racial trade unionism varied according to industry and region, the late 1930s stands out in retrospect as a period in which the collective work and perseverance of many deeply committed individuals paved the way for the successes of the 1940s.
The World War II period and its immediate aftermath witnessed a dramatic rise in the organization and militancy of black trade unions. African workers refused to comply with the numerous War Measures Acts introduced to ensure continuous production for a distant war that brought large profits to South African industrialists. Black workers were fighting their own and hence more important war for freedom and democracy in their own land. They exerted their unified power during these years as 52,394 strikers accounted for a loss of 220,205 mandays (4.2 days per striker) between 1940-45. Many, if not most, of these workers and their still fledgling unions received guidance from the Council of Non-European Trade Unions (CNETU). The CNETU had emerged in 1941 as a coordinating body of black trade unions under progressive leadership. Many of the rank and file workers in CNETU-affiliated unions became leaders in the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) a decade later.
Also unique to this period was the successful organization of African mine workers - migrant labourers - into the African Mine Workers Union (AMWU). Led by the disciplined and popular Communist, J. B. Marks, the AMWU brought nothing but fear to the profit-hungry mining corporations and the state. A well-organized black labour force in the mining industry threatened not only the capitalist firms in that sector but also the entire edifice of racial capitalism in South Africa.
Of the thousands of instances where black workers withdrew their labour power, the 1946 African mine workers' strike stands out as probably the most significant strike in South African labour history. In August of that year an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 African migrant workers shut down totally or partially 21 mines in protest against low wages (actually lower than in 1890), intolerable mine compound conditions and the continuation of war-time legislation. The state responded with predictable violence: after one week (when the strike ended), 12 Africans had been killed and over 1,200 injured by police. Although smashed by the forces of reaction, the mine workers' strike was a watershed in South African history in that it demonstrated the potential strength of black trade unions that could mobilize even migrant workers who daily faced the most exploitative conditions and seemingly invincible bosses. It was the forerunner of many strikes by migrant workers throughout the next three decades and, more importantly, it put to rest the myth of the migrant workers as incapable of developing militant class consciousness against the employer class.
The Nationalist Party's ascension to power in 1948, two years later, heralded the emergence of a government whose intent was to impose their fascist policy of apartheid into every nook and cranny of South African society. Creating a racially-divided trade union movement became the most important priority, especially as any non-racial unity of "poor white- Afrikaner workers (recently forced into urban areas and rapidly proletarianized) and black workers would pose a threat to racist ideology and the cheap labour system. The Nationalists lost no time in drafting draconian legislation directed against nonracial and political trade unionism.
Even prior to the enactment of the IC Act of 1956, the apartheid regime's first attack on progressive trade unionism was the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950. A loosely-defined "Communism" in the Act allowed the government to ban the most popular and progressive, democratically-elected leaders of the day from all trade union activity. By the end of 1955, 56 leaders (28 Whites, 17 Africans, 7 Coloureds, 4 Indians) had been driven out of their positions; many of these unionists came from registered unions of white, Indian and coloured workers and, as well, from the executive of the Trades and Labour Council, the largest coordinating body of registered trade unions between 1930 and 1954. They were banned in effect for promoting the principles of non-racial trade unionism.
With the progressive trade unionists of the registered and unregistered (CNETU) trade union movements crippled by the Suppression Act, the regime then set its sights on coopting the more liberal and moderate leadership into the apartheid fold. This opportunistic and racially privileged segment of the registered unions proceeded to sacrifice every basic principle of trade unionism the world over by agreeing to exclude African trade unions from the Trades and Labour Council. The T&LC dissolved over this issue and was replaced by the South African Trade Union Council in 1954; the SATUC changed its name to Trade Union Council of South Africa (TUCSA) at a later date. It is this coordinating body that for the past twenty-five years has vacillated on the question of including black trade unions within its ranks; in general, TUCSA concerns itself with the fate and organization of black workers only when it is to the benefit of its white membership to do so. African workers especially have never had much difficulty in perceiving and rejecting the opportunism of TUCSA and its policy of class collaboration with the bosses.
The emergence of SACTU and non-racial trade unionism
On 5 March 1955, the first non-racial trade union coordinating body was born - the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU). For a quarter of a century SACTU has continued to spearhead the workers' struggle against apartheid. SACTU's principles, policies and deep-rooted traditions of non-compromise have stood the test of time and struggle, and for these reasons even the state repression against SACTU leaders and unions never separated it from the people themselves.
Originally an amalgam of unregistered African trade unions affiliated to the CNETU and 14 registered trade unions that refused to join the opportunistic TUCSA, SACTU emerged in the mid-1950s to play a necessary role in the economic and political struggle against racial capitalism. In those early years SACTU bridged the gap between two generations of progressive trade unionists: on the one hand, the many trade union leaders banned under the Suppression of Communism Act in the early 1950s continued to assist the new organization with their combined expertise and commitment: on the other hand, a new generation of black, predominantly African, trade unions surfaced to give SACTU its roots in the oppressed masses. This latter group became the SACTU leaders, organizers and activists in the difficult years of above ground struggle between 1955 and 1964.
The historic task assumed by SACTU in 1955 was nothing less than the effective organization of black workers into disciplined, democratic and militant trade unions unwilling to compromise with the fascist architects of apartheid or the capitalist corporations which live off cheap, black labour. With this most formidable task and most essential goal, SACTU initiated its policies in conformity with two basic principles -non-racial and political trade unionism.
Non-racial trade unionism threatens the entire basis of the system of labour exploitation in that it confronts the racial wage structure of monopoly capital and the racial divide-andrule policy of the state. Breaking down these institutionalized barriers between workers who share the`common experience of selling their labour power constitutes the greatest danger to white,domination and capitalism as well. SACTU clearly identified itself with non-racial trade unionism in its Declaration of Principles adopted at the Foundation Conference:
The future of the people of South Africa is in the hands of the workers. Only the working class, in alliance with 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.
But the working class can only succeed in this great and noble endeavour if it is united and strong, if it is conscious of its inspiring responsibility. The workers of South Africa need a united trade union movement in which all sections of the working class can play their part, unhindered by prejudice or racial discrimination ....
We firmly declare that the interests of all workers are alike .... We resolve that this coordinating body of trade unions shall strive to unite all workers in its ranks, without discrimination, and without prejudice. We resolve that this body shall determinedly seek to further and protect the interests of all workers, and that its guiding motto shall be the universal slogan of working class solidarity: "An injury to one is an injury to all"!
Such a bold declaration of principle and policy openly challenged not only the power of the state but also the acquiescence of the registered (e.g. TUCSA) coordinating bodies. Not surprisingly, the white-dominated unions and federations refused to forsake racial privilege for genuine workers' unity; instead they attempted to distance themselves from not only the non-racial principle put forward by SACTU but also the political commitment that is a prerequisite to meaningful change. Only a handful of white trade unionists joined ranks with SACTU in the 1950s and 1960s - and virtually all were victimized by the government.
Political trade unionism seems an obvious necessity in the South African context, yet surprisingly many trade unions (particularly some black "parallel" unions dominated by their white parent bodies) have accepted the state's policy of "no politics in the trade union movement". A moment's reflection will confirm the reformist character of this position. Insofar as the overwhelming majority of the South African working class are oppressed as a nation, and insofar as this same majority constitute the black working class, it follows that any black trade unionism that eliminates the struggle for national liberation from its programme is, in the final analysis, incapable of representing the real interests of its members.
SACTU's oft-quoted declaration on this subject of political struggle and trade unionism remains as valid today as when it was drafted in the 1950s:
SACTU is conscious of the fact that the organizing of the mass of workers for higher wages, better conditions of life and labour is inextricably bound up with a determined struggle for political rights and liberation from all oppressive laws and practices. It follows that a mere struggle for economic rights of all the workers without participation in the general struggle for political emancipation would condemn the trade union movement to uselessness and to a betrayal of the interests of the workers.
[Statement of Policy submitted to the first annual conference of SACTU, Cape Town, March 1956 ]
Furthermore, this commitment to a simultaneous struggle both on the economic and political fronts reflected SACTU's fundamental understanding of the crucial relationship between racism and capitalism:
SACTU is a working class organization representing the interests of working people, more especially that of the homeless, voteless and landless masses of the working class of our land, whose daily lives are at the mercy of the dominating white minority. SACTU conducts a fierce struggle against exploitation.
Capitalism thrives on profits derived from the workers, on the exploitation of workers and the deprivation of human rights. Such is the nature of capitalism and it holds no brief for the aspirations of the producers of its wealth. It rejects everything that stands in the way of profits and uses its power mercilessly to crush its opposition.... It is the nature of capitalism to use many devices to camouflage its naked exploitation of the workers. In South Africa, the device used to create super profits is racial discrimination ....
[Mark Shope, op.cit. ]
Armed with these principles, SACTU embarked in 1955 on a task that will be realized only with the total liberation of the people from the double chains of national oppression and class exploitation. SACTU's policies also spoke directly to all those opportunistic elements in the trade union movement - both South African and international - to let it be known that SAC TU could not be diverted from these basic objectives.
One abortive attempt to divert, indeed to smash, SACTU came with the formation of the Federation of Free African Trade Unions of South Africa (FOFATUSA) in 1959. It is difficult to consider seriously FOFATUSA as a legitimate coordinating body in that in its six short years of existence it never held a national conference, never seriously challenged the apartheid state, and never set about the principle task of organizing the unorganized. FOFATUSA's limited base of support centred around Lucy Mvubelo's Garment Workers Union of African Women; it is important to note that Lucy Mviabelo had previously been a SACTU executive member but was one of the few black trade unionists who betrayed the black workers' real struggle by joining the reformist camp of "no politics" in the trade union movement. FOFATUSA's rapid rise and fall also bears upon intrigues masterminded by international trade union bodies, particularly the ICFTU, in an attempt to break the growing power of SACTU in the late 1950s. After the ICFTU failed to lure SACTU away from the Congress Alliance with large amounts of money in exchange for political compromise, there is little doubt that these funds were directed towards the creation of FOFATUSA with the full complicity of the whitedominated Trade Union Council of South Africa (TUCSA). Although certain FOFATUSA leaders were also members of the breakaway Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), it soon became clear for all to see that FOFATUSA was not indigenous but rather an artificial transplant, alien to black working class soil. SACTU, and only SACTU, effectively mobilized the black workers in their combined struggle against national oppression and class exploitation.
From a coordinating body with 19 trade unions representing an affiliated membership of 20,000 in 1955, SACTU organizing campaigns succeeded in building non-racial trade unionism to 35 unions and 53,000 workers (including 38,791 African workers) by 1961. In every industrial centre of South Africa, SACTU local committees strengthened existing unions by responding to the material needs of their memberships while simultaneously expending tireless energies in organizing the large mass of unorganized black workers.
The overall significance of SACTU's impact during the 1950s cannot be measured by numbers alone. Of great importance was the fact that African workers in manufacturing industry were brought into the political struggle by SACTU as one of the components of the Congress Alliance. The Alliance, also created in 1955, consisted of organizations representing the nationally oppressed Africans (the African National Congress, ANC), Indians (South African Indian Congress), Coloureds (South African Coloured People's Congress) and progressive Whites (South African Congress of Democrats). As the only explicit class-based component of the Alliance, SACTU brought thousands of African workers directly into the many popular Congress campaigns against national oppression. Mass-based political strikes that characterized the uprisings in the mid- 1 970s have their historical roots in Congress-initiated national "Stayat-Homes" that were called in the 1950s and early 1960s. After the State of Emergency and the banning of the liberation movement, the African National Congress, SACTU often continued to play a key role in mobilizing Blacks to participate in Congress Alliance campaigns that continued to challenge the regime's right to rule.
By the early 1960s, SACTU leaders also became a prime target of the state's notorious - and revised for the occasion -security laws and fascist brutality. There is no need to exaggerate SACTU's successes or its failures between 1955 and 1964, but the record clearly shows that SACTU campaigns and activities threatened the power of monopoly capital and the state. It was precisely SACTU's ability to shape its campaigns to identify with the black, particularly African, workers' most urgent needs that accounted for its popularity in those years -and subsequently in an underground capacity. The translation of these immediate needs emanating from the workplace into SACTU demands and political campaigns of the Congress Movement served to establish the principles and traditions of SACTU that carry forward to the present day.
On the wage front, starvation wages in the 1950s prompted SACTU to launch the famous £1-a-Day ("One-pound-a-day") campaign following the Alexandra Bus Boycott of 1957. The campaign gained instant popularity with African workers and the black population generally, and many employers were forced to respond with wage increases. As for relating to other material needs of the workers, it should also be pointed out that the SACTU head office in Johannesburg and local committees throughout the country spent endless hours, days and months attempting to track down Africans eligible for Workmen's Compensation benefits after they had been forced to return to the "homelands- following injuries at work. Literally hundreds of memoranda on unemployment insurance, wage demands, Job Reservation, and even progressive positions regarding international crises in those years fill the SACTU archives of working class struggle. Beyond this, organizers - almost always unpaid - and full-time functionaries spent all available ---freetime" attempting to penetrate and mobilize workers in mining compounds, domestic service and on the white farms. The latter two organizing drives yielded successes in the Transvaal - if only temporarily.
All of this activity continued - indeed increased - during the initial months of heavy repression directed against SACTU and the entire Congress Movement. A three-month ban on all SACTU meetings in 1961 was soon followed by the introduction of the General Law Amendment Act (also known as Sabotage Act) and a whole range of repressive legislation that virtually made trade unionism a crime against the state. Massive arrests of SACTU leaders and organizers for 90-day, then 180-day periods without trial (and often with torture) were coupled with the systematic banning of nearly all SACTU functionaries within the space of a few months in 1963 and 1964.
Many SACTU activists were sentenced to varying lengths of term in prison - some for life - for acts of "sabotage" against the entire apartheid system. Vuyisile Mini, Wilson Khayinga, Zinakile Mkaba, Caleb Mayekiso and "Looksmart" S. Ngudle - these five SACTU heroes were killed in detention by the security police in the 1960s. Those who managed to escape this brutal victimization either went underground or into exile, in both cases to rebuild the non-racial trade union movement as part of the national liberation struggle
It is important to also mention that SACTU was never officially banned by the apartheid regime. The inevitable outcry from the international trade union movement and global community that would have resulted then and now has obviously forced the South African state to step back from this final action. Nevertheless, the massive repression directed against nonracial and political trade unionism took its toll as the mid- to late-1960s were characterized by relative quiet on the black workers' front. True to centuries of struggle, however, the black workers soon recovered to raise the banner of independent and democratic trade unionism in the decade of the 1970s
It is extremely difficult to encapsulate a decade of events and single it out as unique (see outline of 1970s on following page). A pattern common to the history of black labour in South Africa emerges - courageous resistance, brutal repression and misguided reformism.
Despite all attempts by the South African ruling class to suppress trade union organization and participation in collective bargaining by African workers, these workers have, continually refused to submit passively to a system which denies their rights as workers and as citizens. As early as 1856 African dock workers in Port Elizabeth went on strike for higher wages, and throughout the twentieth century there has been a continual struggle to develop and expand effective trade unions for African workers (see Table 1 for a listing of the earliest known strikes by black workers).
The 1970s in particular have witnessed tremendous developments in this sphere; not since the 1950s has there been such mass action taken by African workers, nor has there been such an enormous growth of trade unions formed to cater to the needs of South Africa's most exploited workers. In this chapter, we will examine the emergence of this phenomenon in detail, focusing on the regrouping of black, particularly African workers to struggle for independent unions and against their heightened conditions of exploitation.
During the period from the mid- 1 960s to the early 1970s there was a distinct lull in working class activity by African workers. This was largely due to the heavy repression directed against workers and leaders of SACTU in the early 1960s. Between
TABLE 1: EARLIEST KNOWN STRIKES BY BLACK WORKERS IN SOUTH AFRICA
| Date | Place | Reason | Strikers | |
| March 1854 | Cape Town | Wages | Coloured boatmen and stevedores | |
| 31 May 1856 | Port Elizabeth | African dock workers | ||
| 7 January 1857 | East London | African dock workers | ||
| October 1858 | Kowie | Food | 200 African workers leave work | |
| January 1861 |
|
|||
| 1860s-70s | Many strikes by African navvies on railway and other public works construction. | |||
| 23 July 1877 | Kimberley | Wages | 50 African workers for mining boards (i.e. public works) | |
| July 1877 | Port Elizabeth | Wages | African workers in harbour | |
| May 1878 | East London | Dock workers | ||
| December 1880 | East London | African railway workers | ||
| August 1882 | Cape Town | Asian dock workers | ||
| 5 April 1887 | Kimberley | Anal examinations | African miners | |
| October 1896 | Johannesburg | 6,000 African miners |
Source: Reprinted in South African Labour Bulletin, Vol. 3, No. 7, June-July/1977
AN OUTLINE OF THE REVIVAL OF INDEPENDENT BLACK TRADE UNIONISM IN SOUTH AFRICA IN THE 1970s
1971-72 Migrant workers strike in Namibia; dock workers and Public Utility Transport Company (PUTCO) workers strike in South Africa-an early indication of a new wave of resistance.
1973 An estimated 100,000 workers participated in a massive strike wave centred mainly in Natal and precipitated by workers in the low-wage textile industry.
The apartheid regime introduced the Bantu Labour Relations Regulation Act, a direct response to this rising worker militancy.
In September, South African police shot 38 black miners at Western Deep Levels gold mine: 12 were killed. The issue was the workers' demand for a living wage.
1973-75 New unions for black workers emerged throughout the country, with new confidence generated by the 1973 strikes.
1976 June-October: The Soweto uprising against Bantu education shook the foundations of South African society. Over 1,000 black people-mostly young students-were shot dead by the police and military. Workers joined their sons and daughters and some, like SACTU militant Lawrence Ndzanga, were murdered in detention. The international community was shocked by this brutal response to peaceful demonstrations and international capital was temporarily withdrawn from some sectors.
1977 The apartheid regime appointed the Wiehahn Commission to investigate industrial labour legislation and the Riekert Commission to examine influx control; both Commissions were designed to intensify and streamline control of the black working class and their independent trade unions.
Around this time, and subsequently, "Codes of Conduc"' were drafted by international monopoly capital to find a means of protecting profits and containing working class resistance.
1979 The Industrial Conciliation Amendment Act was enacted upon the government's acceptance of the Wiehahn Commission report (part one).
1979-80 Mass strikes by African workers in every major sector of the manufacturing industry-textile workers, auto workers, food and canning workers, meat workers, municipal workers. Many leaders were detained as a result of the strikes and massive repression was directed against Johannesburg municipal workers-over 1,200 of the 10,000 or so strikers were forcibly deported to the barren Bantustans to join the thousands of unemployed in apartheid's dumping grounds.
1960 and 1966, over 160 SACTU office holders were banned from taking part in SACTU or any other trade union activity; countless others were arrested, imprisoned and forced into exile during these years. In 1964, three members of the Port Elizabeth local committee of SACTU were hanged in Pretoria Central Prison after being convicted of "sabotage" and complicity in the death of a police informer. (Three others were later hanged for the actual murder.)
From 1965 to the early 1970s it was a period of rebuilding and reorganizing after the heavy repression directed against the Congress Alliance in the early 1960s. The African working class had lost some of its most dedicated leaders as many were forced to flee South Africa and others languished in the prisons of apartheid. SACTU was forced to turn to underground organizing and its affiliated unions attempted to carry on its principles and programme without daring to raise the name of SACTU openly. Despite the obstacles, SACTU militants of previous years and new trade union recruits worked amidst great dangers and tremendous difficulties to maintain underground contact with each other and with SACTU leaders working from outside South Africa.
As a consequence of the heavy repression in the early 1960s, the level of strike action by African workers dropped considerably during this period and trade union membership declined accordingly. The number of workers on strike per year during the 1960s decreased to about 2,000 compared with an average of 5,800 a year from 1955 to 1960. In the light of this decline in working class militancy and organization, it is surprising that strikes occurred even at the level they did. There were, however, a few courageous acts of defiance, especially by textile workers and dock workers in Durban. The state's response to the Durban dock workers who went on strike in April 1969 was predictable: armed police and the Special Branch moved in and, after screening, 400 of the 1,500 strikers were allowed to return to work. The rest were given four hours to leave Durban.
In general, the exploitation of African workers intensified throughout the 1960s under conditions of an expanding, highly profitable and aggressive capitalist economy, and went virtually unchallenged. Rapid economic development with a massive influx of foreign' capital, coupled with the intense repression which virtually chopped off the SACTU leadership, militated against the rebuilding of a strong independent trade union movement.
By the early 1970s, however, African workers in particular were hard hit by the escalation of price increases of essential items such as food, clothing and transport. Real wages of black workers declined as their living standards were attacked once more. The increases reflected both the growth of inflation affecting all capitalist countries and also the crisis within South Africa itself. Locally manufactured commodities were increasingly unable to compete on international markets.
As SACTU explained in its Memorandum submitted to the ILO anti-apartheid conference in June 1973:
Calculations appear to indicate that the per capita income of Africans has fallen and that Africans are poorer than they were ten years ago. This, in spite of a growth rate of more than 5.5 07o per annum. There has been rapid industrialization, urban development, fast growth - yet Africans are worse off overall.
This is borne out by examination of the calculations of the Poverty Datum Line (PDL) made over a number of years:
TABLE 2: MEAN POVERTY DATUM LINE INDEX, DURBAN 1958-73
| Year | Mean PDL (in Rand) | Index 1971 = 100 |
| 1958 | 41.05 | 60.5 |
| 1971 | 67.87 | 100.0 |
| 1972 | 74.66 | 110.0 |
| 1973 | 95.26 | 140.0 |
Though it took thirteen years (1958 to 1971) for basic prices to rise 40 per cent, they escalated by the same percentage in only two years, 1971-3. A rapidly increasing rate of black unemployment and greater disparities in the racially-determined wage system added to the black workers' burden.
Black workers respond to the attack on their standard of living
The massive resistance campaign launched by black workers in the early 1970s came as a direct result of a higher cost of living. A new cycle in the black working class struggle had begun to emerge. By 1973 the apartheid regime and the corporations exploiting black workers were challenged by the greatest strike wave in South African history.
Prior to this mass action by workers in South Africa, the general strike of thousands of Namibian contract workers in Windhoek during 1971 heralded the rebirth of worker militancy directed against the conditions of exploitation imposed upon them by an illegal apartheid regime. Between 13 December 1971 and 20 January 1972, approximately 20,000 migrant workers brought the mining industry to a halt and interrupted communications and transport systems as well as commercial operations and rural production. The strikes, a direct attack on the system of migrant-contract labour and the system of influx control, were eventually quelled by force. South African Defence Force troops were sent in, there were mass arrests of striking workers and six people were shot dead in what became known as the "Bloody Sunday" massacre on 20 January. However, workers did receive small gains in wages and working conditions and also forced the elimination of the South West African Native Labour Association (SWANLA), previously responsible for administering the contract labour system.
The most important effect was on the workers themselves. Their collective resistance demonstrated their determination to advance the class struggle against apartheid exploitation. As well their actions have inspired black workers in South Africa to take up the fight once again.
Between 1970 and 1973 there were a few sporadic acts of resistance in the form of strikes inside South Africa, as indicated in Table 3 below.
TABLE 3: AFRICAN STRIKE ACTIVITY IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1970-76
| Year | Stoppages | African workers involved |
| 1970 | 76 | 3,232 |
| 1971 | 69 | 4,067 |
| 1972 | 71 | 8,711 |
| 1973 | 370 | 90,082 |
| 1974 | 384 | 57,656 |
| 1975 | 270 | 22,546 |
| 1976 | 245 | 26,291 |
The momentum of resistance was building up throughout the latter half of 1972. In June, 300 PUTCO drivers went on strike and as a result won 33 1/3 per cent wage increases and formed themselves into the Transport and Allied Workers Union. A remarkable degree of worker solidarity was expressed throughout this strike and in subsequent strikes by dock workers in Durban and Cape Town. The militant stevedores of Cape Town showed an acute perception of their bargaining power in October and November 1972 by staging a work-to-rule campaign right at the time when the Suez Canal was closed and Cape Town traffic was at its peak.
The mass strikes of 1973
Although I make blankets for Mr Philip Frame, I can't afford to buy blankets for my children.
A worker speaking at a mass meeting of striking textile workers, 1973
Interviewer: What gave the workers the idea that a strike would help them?
Answer: Because employers are employers because of workers.A tea-maker earning RI0.45 per week
[The Durban Strikes, 1973, Institute for Industrial Education, in association with Ravan Press, Durban-Johannesburg, 1974, pp. 21 and 50.]
Working class activity reached a peak in 1973 when African workers collectively expressed their outrage against poverty wages and increased exploitation. An estimated 100,000 workers participated in a dramatic series of short but widespread industrial strikes centred mainly in Natal. In the first three months alone, over 61,000 workers were involved in 160 strikes, directly confronting their employers at the point of production.
The wave of strikes began on 9 January at Coronation Brick and Tile Company, a brickworks on the outskirts of Durban. Here, the entire work force, nearly 2,000 workers, went on strike demanding an increase in the minimum cash wage from R8.97 to R20.00 per week. The strike received much publicity and the workers stood firm until they were given acceptable increases. Banner headlines in the papers were accompanied by photographs of the workers massed on the football field, or marching down the road carrying a red flag (apparently for traffic control).
The relative success of this first strike probably influenced workers at the other factories who subsequently took strike action. On 25 January, the trickle of strike action of the past few weeks began to turn into a massive stream when workers spilled out of the large factories in the Pinetown-New Germany industrial complex. The action began at Frametex textile factory in New Germany; workers there had long been dissatisfied with wages and working conditions (as low as R5.00-R9.00 a week) and were now demanding R20.00 per week.
By the next day, the strike had spread to all the other Frame Group factories in the area and affected approximately 6,000 African workers and also many Indian workers. These militant workers were successful in forcing the Frame Group - well known for its oppressive employment practices - to increase wages by between R1.75 and R3.00. This particular struggle against Frame is reminiscent of SACTU workers in the Textile Workers industrial Union and the African Textile Workers Industrial Union who fought many bitter battles for higher wages and improved working conditions in the 1950s.
Durban's industrial working class is made up of the largest number of African workers in the whole of South Africa - an estimated 165,000 in 1973. These workers were concentrated in larger factories in close proximity to one another and hence the strikes spread rapidly from one factory to another and from one industrial area to another. Unity of workers was a key factor to the success of the mass strikes in Natal, cutting across the divisions between migrant and urban workers, between different industries, and even between industrial and agricultural sectors.
As the strikes spread, a definite pattern of conducting activities emerged. In almost every case strikers refused to put forward any representatives, fearing management might resort to the victimization practised in the past. Strikers also remained on site at their respective factories - an important strategy which allowed workers in neighbouring factories to see what was happening and influenced them to take similar action themselves.
Workers usually shouted out their demands for between R20 and R30 per week and refused to return to work or elect leaders. In most cases minor wage increases were eventually offered and workers were forced through necessity to return to their jobs. David Hemson, research officer of the Textile Workers Industrial Union at the time and later banned for his trade union activity, describes the workers' actions as follows:
As one factory returned to work, another came out on strike; for a number of days there were 20,000 workers on strike from a number of industries and services, reaching a peak of 50,000strikers at a single moment. The momentum of the strike wave was ultimately broken through the growing presence of the police in army uniforms flown in from other centres, and the lack of strike funds....
Despite the relatively small wage increases (between R1.00 and R2.50 per week) the consciousness of the workers had advanced considerably beyond the relative caution of the period of repression before the strikes. The overwhelming number of strikes had been successful (in the sense that wage increases had been won and strikers not dismissed) because the strikes were able to take on a mass form.
["Trade Unionism and the Struggle for Liberation in South Africa", in Capital and Class, Autumn 1978, No. 6, p. 21.]
Although the wage increases won were relatively small, the striking African workers had demonstrated their potentia power to the employers and the state, and advanced their own consciousness in the process. Very few workers were prosecuted for striking compared to other years of intense strike activity. Only 207 (or 0.2 per cent) of the 98,029 black strikers in the whole of 1973 were prosecuted, compared with 822 out of 3,462 (or 24 percent) in 1959. Police impotence in the face of mass action at the work place may partly explain this situation. A more capital intensive industry had developed in the 1960s, too, and wages formed a smaller percentage of total costs. Hence, employers could afford to increase wages within a certain limit without being as dependent on police repression as labour intensive industries, e.g. stevedoring.
Due to the nature of capitalism, employers like the Frame Group would not otherwise have raised wages (thereby reducing profits) until forced to do so by black working class action. In the conflict between capital and labour this is the only way working people can gain minor improvements in their quality of life. In South Africa, the problem is severely compounded by racial oppression.
There are two additional aspects of the 1973 strikes worth noting. Firstly, although the principal demands put forward by strikers were essentially economic, we cannot ignore the political nature of their demands. As SACTU had demonstrated in the past, the two are always intertwined. For the striking workers of Natal, to demand such a high level of wage increases meant that they too recognized that this coul
only come about by a complete transformation of the apartheid system. Their united and disciplined action also demonstrated an unvocalized demand for the right to associate and organize freely. Hemson sums up this point:
The mass defiance of legal subordination and control showed a complete rejection of the idea of a passive working class accepting employment as a privilege and unsure of its own potential. Within the resistance to apartheid the mass strikes demonstrated the leading position of the black working class in the struggle against apartheid ....
[Op. cit., p. 22.]
Secondly, although on the surface the strikes appeared to be purely spontaneous acts of mass resistance, this needs some clarification. Though spontaneous, the strikes were not unorganized; they point to the existence of growing underground activity by workers both at the point of production and in the townships. This underground machinery is necessary for the protection and support of the open struggles and emanates from the class consciousness and organic leadership within the factories. The strikes expressed collective action by workers guided by strong working class leadership. The widespread wave of strikes in Natal forced the state to introduce legislation extending the token "right to strike" to African workers; it also gave impetus to the development of the independent trade union movement and forced the state and capital into hurried attempts to develop more sophisticated measures to ensure the continued exploitation of black workers under capitalism.
Twelve shot dead for picketing
In contrast to the relative restraint shown by the police and the state when faced with the militant upsurge of strike activity by black workers earlier in 1973, events at Carletonville later that year elicited a bloody and callous response.
On 11 September 1973, the South African police shot 38 -12 fatally - at the Western Deep Levels gold mine in Carletonville near Johannesburg. The dispute started when approximately 200 machine operators (semi-skilled miners) demanded an increase in wages commensurate with other grades. As a reaction to management rejection of their demand, a strike was called and pickets were stationed at the entrance of the tunnel leading from the compound to the head shaft to prevent night staff from going on duty. The mine manager called the police who entered the mine shaft where the men had assembled, unarmed. A vicious baton charge followed, interspersed by volleys of tear gas. Then the order to open fire rang out and left 12 men dead, 26 injured and 37 arrested.
Western Deep Levels is owned by the so-called "liberal" Harry Oppenheimer and his Anglo-American Corporation, and employed 7,500 African mine workers in 1973. In April of that year the Corporation had boasted wage increases averaging 26 per cent for all its African workers employed in the gold mines. However, this only brought their wage levels to approximately £20 per month, still well below the Poverty Datum Line. Then in June the Corporation granted wage increases averaging £49.69 per month to white miners; this increase was more than double the black miners' total wage! And as these black workers rose up to protest the gross inequalities perpetuated by Anglo-American, they were gunned down violently.
At the subsequent inquest the mine manager washed his hands of any responsibility.---I wasn't going to interfere with his (the commanding officer's) responsibility for his men," the mine manager told the inquest. Asked about his concern for the safety of his own employees, he replied that this question was "not relevant---. Predictably, the inquest completely exonerated the police from any blame for the killings and found that the mine authorities were fully justified in calling in the police in the face of intimidation.
Undeterred by the combined forces of employers and state, African workers continued to press their demands for a living wage and the right to organize. The strike wave which began in 1973 continued throughout 1974, with a total of 374 recorded stoppages, involving 57,656 Africans. Unlike the 1973 strikes which were concentrated in Natal, the 1974 strikes were spread throughout the country-203 in the Transvaal (22,552 African workers), 25 in the Orange Free State (2,386 Africans), 96 in Natal (18,993 Africans) and 50 in the Cape (13,725 Africans).
The success of the 1973 strikes engendered a new confidence and working class struggles found expression in the establishment of new independent, unregistered trade unions for black workers. In 1971, there had been 10 unions representing these workers; by 1977 there were 27. The resurgence of strike action in the early 1970s also produced a greater militancy as well as in creased numbers. The 10 unions of the late 1960s were mainly passive subordinates of the registered unions, but these new unions proved willing to confront directly the power of the South African ruling class.
New developments in African trade union organization
The upsurge of militancy by black workers in the early 1970 coincided with and to a large extent influenced the development of various forms of worker organizations throughout the country. African workers and their supporters had begun to realize again the potential strength of an organized African work force in procuring a greater share of the immense wealth of South Africa. Only through effective organization could these workers begin to assert some control over their own labour power.
Despite the many obstacles in their way - the barriers created within the industrial legislation, the obstructionist tactics by management, the general lack of information and the tremendous difficulties in organizing the unorganized - viable trade unions representing African workers began springing up throughout the country.
As a consequence of the renewed confidence in uniting collectively to gain the strength necessary to challenge employers and the state, by the end of August 1975, there existed a total of 25 African unions with a combined membership of approximately 66,000. The National Union of Clothing Workers accounted for some 23,000 members and of the remainder, approximately 36,000 were members of the 17 unions formed after the 1973 strikes.
The regenerated workers' movement lacked the unity and strength which characterized the high points of struggle in thelate 1950s and the early 1960s, but it was still in the process of rebuilding and was to develop at an increasingly rapid rate over the next few years.
1. TUCSA AND THE "PARALLEL" UNIONS
"The 'parallel unions' look after us when we are dead. When we are alive, they do nothing." A worker
Before examining the progressive thrust of the new movement for independent African unions, it is first necessary to set the record straight on TUCSA's role in attempting to control this development.
As mentioned in Chapter Three, the Trade Union Council of South Africa's own policies regarding the organization of African workers have changed several times over the years. From 1954 to 1962 TUCSA firmly closed its doors to unions of African workers; indeed, as pointed out above, it was founded for that purpose. Following the initial years, in 1962 it decided to let African unions become affiliates; in 1967, it forced Africans out; in 1968, it decided again to let Africans in; in 1969, it decided once again to drive them out; in 1973, it decided to set up "parallel" unions for African workers and this remained its policy until 1980.
The sham of these "parallel" unions was rejected by the majority of African workers and their unions, who correctly recognized them as attempts to subjugate black workers to domination by the registered unions representing privileged skilled workers.
An article in the Financial Mail, 19 November 1976, detailed some of the facts about "parallel" unions:
It is no wonder, then, that the article in the Financial Mail posed the following question: "When is a trade union not a trade union?" and answered: "When it is a 'parallel' union for Africans. "
2. SACTU'S ROLE IN THE 1970s
To many, SACTU embodies the most highly developed principles and policies of all trade unions in the industrial history of South Africa. Even after the severe repression directed against the organization and its leaders in the early 1960s, SACTU has become a crucial vanguard in developing and intensifying the struggle of the black working class. Its leaders have recognized the importance of this role, as stated in SACTU's official organ, Workers Unity:
Ours is a revolutionary struggle. Every means, legal and illegal, open and underground, on issues large and small must be used to build the fighting strength of the working class.
As state repression of the legal struggle of African workers through their independent unions has grown increasingly severe and the limits of legal action have been curtailed, the importance of a strong underground network is being fully realized. It is the underground where important linkages between the political and economic struggles are forged and the programme of the workers' movement coordinated with the national struggle being waged by the African National Congress (ANC). SACTU provides informal support and leadership to the various formations struggling for democratically-controlled independent trade unions.
SACTU acknowledges the important role of these new unions even though links with them must, out of necessity, be concealed.
These organizations are forced by the repression to keep themselves cut off from the liberation struggle as a whole, but we do not oppose them. Our policy is to fight for independent unions and give these organizations our support - in as far as they advance the workers' struggle.
Within them (the unregistered unions) and among their leadership various tendencies are to be found. There are, of course, not a few reformists, opportunists or even collaborators - but there are also many who will walk the tightrope of personal danger in truly serving the struggle of the working class.
[Workers Unity, No. 5, Sept. 1977, p. 1. 5 24 August 1980.]
Outside the country SACTU is able to act openly to represent the interests and aspirations of South Africa's most exploited workers. From its main exile bases in Southern Africa and Britain, it maintains extensive contacts with the international labour movement and is able to consistently provide information and analysis of the current situation.
SACTU has thus continued, both within South Africa and internationally, to work towards the destruction of the entire repressive and exploitative apparatus, political and economic, which characterizes apartheid South Africa and the creation of a democratic, non-racial society in its place. And, as the Johannesburg Sunday Post recently concluded in its review of SACTU's history (Organize or Starve: the History of SACTU'), SACTU "operates in this country today still, as it has for the past 25 years, spearheading the workers' struggle".
3. THE NEW FORMATIONS IN THE EARLY 1970s
In Natal, which had been the focal point for the first wave of mass strikes, the General Factory Workers' Benefit Fund (GFWBF) was already in existence. Formed in mid-1972 (formally constituted in September of that year) to provide funeral benefits to African workers, the Fund also dealt with industrial complaints and had attracted mass support in the textile and metal factories in the area. The work of the Wages Commission (formed by progressive white students) complemented the Fund's activities. These students published a newspaper for African workers, Isisebenzi, which carried news on workers' rights, on wage board meetings, industrial legislation and strike activity; they also made frequent representations to wage boards for new unskilled worker determinations.
The Fund had a longer term aim of being a stepping stone to trade unionism proper, intending to channel sections of its members into industrial unions when membership had advanced sufficiently. Events in Natal in 1973 greatly accelerated this process, resulting in the formation of unions at a much earlier stage than contemplated. Soon after the strikes, workers began crowding into the Fund's Bolton Hall premises every Saturday morning to apply for membership - sometimes 500 workers at a time!
One writer has suggested:
The high level of consciousness amongst Natal workers can be partly attributed to SACTU activity, the existence of the General Factory Workers' Benefit Fund which provided a basis for the formation of unions, and the activities of the students and African staff members of the Wages Commission of the University of Natal.
[Africa, No. 58, June 1976.]
The first union was formed by GFWBF members in metal factories in Pietermaritzburg. The advanced consciousness displayed by these workers was due in part to previous SACTU activity in these same factories. SACTU's affiliate, the Metal Workers Union, had represented these workers throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, until its leaders were either imprisoned, banned or forced into exile. Now they were on the move again and new leaders emerged to carry on the militant tradition.
In Jun6, workers in Durban formed the second branch of the new Metal and Allied Workers Union (MAWU), and in August the National Union of Textile Workers and the Union of Clothing and Allied Workers were constituted. By this stage the need for a coordinating body was urgently felt, and so in October 1973 the Trade Union Advisory and Coordinating Council (TUACC) was formed. Two new unions, the Chemical and Allied Workers Industrial Union and the Transport and General Workers Union, affiliated later.
TUACC was set up both to coordinate the activities of the unregistered unions then being formed in Natal and to liaise with Kwazulu Bantustan authorities on matters concerning African workers (although this connection was later severed) ' From the beginning it was committed to open unions, nationally organized according to industrial sectors, and based on strong factory floor organization. Those involved in setting it up were aiming for a strong coordinating body comprised at each level of a majority of worker representatives which decided policy for the affiliates and controlled the resources they jointly pooled. TUACC provided practical administrative and secretarial services for affiliated unions, assisted in the development of coordinated strategies among affiliated unions and the establishment of national and international links for these unions.
In Johannesburg in 1976, the Council for the Industrial Workers of the Witwatersrand (CIWW) was formed to provide a coordinating body for the activities of the Industrial Aid Society (IAS), a workers' education and advice project, and the Transvaal branch of MAWU. Since MAWU (Transvaal) was an extension of MAWU (Natal), CIWW was seen as an unnecessary duplication, and in July 1978 CIWW and TUACC amalgamated to form a National TUACC, with regional councils in Natal and the Transvaal. A Joint Legal Defence Fund set up by C~ and TUACC continued to provide a valuable service for numerous workers victimized for union activities or charged for participating in strike action.
It was the TUACC unions which were involved in some of the most bitter struggles for union recognition (see below) during the mid-1970s. These unions also became the major force behind the formation of the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) in early 1979, the first non-racial trade union federation since SACTU.
In 1970, the Urban Training Project (UTP) was formed in Johannesburg by officials from the defunct African affairs section of TUCSA, which had been shut down after the latter had once again closed its doors to African trade unions. The initial aim of UTP was to establish an educational body which would publicize the existing rights of African workers under current labour legislation and which would assist Africans who wished to form a trade union or any other kind of workers' organization. Events all over the country were proving that African workers were indeed ready once again for trade union organization.
The UTP itself was not a worker or a worker-controlled organization. According to its constitution, the Project was "at no time (to) become (either) a trade union or a trade union coordinating body ... nor shall it control a trade union or other workers' organization". However, with funds being pumped into it from the outside to assist existing and new African worker organizations, and because of its own practice of employing organizers and taking leases on behalf of affiliated bodies, it did in fact begin to assume some of these roles. The Black Consultative Committee, formed at the end of 1973, became the formal organization to which the new UTP unions affiliated. (This grouping was also known as the Consultative Committee of Black Trade Unions, CCOBTU.)
Hence, by the end of 1973 there were coordinating bodies for unregistered trade unions in both Natal and the Transvaal. In the Western Cape, two bodies catered for African workers -the African Food and Canning Workers Union (AFCWU), which had been formed back in 1947 and upheld the traditions of SACTU throughout its existence, and the Western Province Workers'Advice Bureau (WPWAB), formed in 1973. In the Eastern Cape, the African FCWU stood alone in representing the aspirations of African workers at this time.
The WPWAB was established in Cape Town to provide advice to workers on wages, working conditions and on their rights as workers; to assist workers in the formation of factory committees and provide for the establishment of benefit funds for the workers. The Bureau also developed an education programme emphasizing worker organization skills and literacy training. The emphasis was on the policy of encouraging the development of factory committees as a primary basis for worker organization, and by 1976 WPWAB had a membership of over 5,000 workers in approximately 50 different establishments.
These various committees were linked together through membership on the controlling committee of the WPWAB, in effect creating a General Workers Union. In fact, in June 1978 WPWAB officially became the Western Province General Workers Union.
A further development in the growth of the African labour movement was the formation of the Black Allied Workers Union (BAWU). >From the outset it was regarded as an extension of the Black Consciousness Movement into the labour sector and therefore concentrated on the development of racial pride within the ranks of black workers.
Black workers are not being oppressed, exploited or discriminated against because they are miners, salesmen, engineers, teachers, doctors or road diggers. They are simply deprived of their rights because they are black.
[BAWU document, n.d. ]
Adopting a similar organizational strategy to the ICU (see Chapter Three), BAWU aimed to organize black workers throughout South Africa irrespective of job category or industrial sector, thus excluding shop floor organizing.
The aim and purpose of BAWU is to organize and unite all black workers into a powerful labour force that can earn the respect and de facto recognition by both the employers and the government; to educate black workers and make them aware of their power and significance at work; to build them into a "oneness" - the spirit of solidarity and unity is essential for the workers' (familihood) ' based on the philosophy of black consciousness and black communalism. It is from this position of strength that black workers could bring about a change in the labour and economic system in view of a political change. Thus BAWU is a workers' unit for the liberation of Blacks in South Africa. Other things, such as workers' rights, privileges, job opportunities, fringe benefits shall automatically follow. This includes legal recognition by the government.
[BAWU document, n.d.]
Drake Koka, leader of BAWU since its inception, emphasized this very general approach to unionism with its strong personal development aspect. This approach is linked to the necessity for increased productivity of black workers.
It was not the intention of BAWU "to hold the economy of the country to ransom by organizing illegal strikes and making unreasonable demands for political reasons" but to raise the productivity of black workers by sponsoring training courses and training centres for black youth.
[D. Davis, African Workers Under Apartheid, International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF), 1979, p. 39].
Politically, Koka perceived the task of his organization as being:
... to win the respect of the employers, the public and the government to create a climate in which the laws about Bantu(sic) trade unions and discriminatory industrial and labour laws could be reformed for the sake of the country's rickety economy.
[Rand Daily Mail, 9 December 1972.]
Indeed, BAWU did win the respect of certain employers. In March 1973, in a letter to the West German churches, Koka revealed that Ford Motor Company of South Africa donated a Ford Escort car worth R2,175 to assist the Union in travelling to organize workers. He reported also that Ford Motor Company in Port Elizabeth had invited the Union to make use of their plant for training of trade union leaders and for research work. In the same document, Koka explained the details of the recent banning order imposed upon him by the apartheid regime. Though banned from visiting factories, publishing or printing premises, receiving visitors, attending gatherings, etc., he said that "thanks to God- he was still allowed to go on with the work of BAWU.
Clearly, BAWU represented no threat to either the employers or the apartheid regime, the same regime that has continued to suppress brutally any workers' movements which openly rise up against exploitation and racism. BAWU has failed to develop either a large or a solid base of support among black workers. In 1976, it was estimated that it had a total of 1,000 paid-up members spread over five offices in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Newcastle, Durban and Umilazi. In that same year, Drake Koka went into exile and established an external office in Botswana. From there he travelled extensively in Western Europe and North America collecting funds for BAWU; he was often sponsored by the central labour bodies in these countries (see Chapter Ten).
It was in October 1977 that the Black Consciousness Movement was subjected to a major onslaught by the state in which almost all Black Consciousness organizations - nineteen altogether - were banned. BAWU itself, interestingly enough, was not on the list. However, the lack of direct leadership (Koka had attempted unsuccessfully to continue as leader in exile) and the state's harassment of BAW1J's internal leadership, served to undermine further the organization's shaky foundations.
In the past, BAWU has been very reliant on the West German churches, the North American labour movement, and in its formative stages, on some multinational corporations. Drake Koka continued to try to raise funds internationally to sponsor the activities of BAWU but these lost virtually all significance in the wake of the new developments in industrial trade unionism for black workers. As we document in Chapter Eight, the South African Allied Workers Union (SAA WU) - a split off from BAWU - has become one of the most dynamic of the new union formations for African workers in recent years.
As it is evident from the examination of the burgeoning black trade union movement following the mass strikes of 1973, a united independent movement had not yet been achieved. The divisions between the various formations seemed to be based on varying ideological and strategic positions and also on their relationship to the national liberation struggle. In summarizing the above information, there were at this time basically six broad groupings:
[Based generally on the tendencies developed by Hemson, op. cit.]
It is possible to classify these tendencies within the unregistered African trade unions according to approximate membership as follows:
| Membership 1975 | Number of unions | |
| Mobilizing unions | 15,620 | 5 |
| Legalistic unions | 12,000 | 10 |
| Subordinate unions | 29,120 | 8 |
| Nationalistic unions | 2,700 | 1 |
| Unaffiliated unions | ||
| WPWAB | 5,000 | |
| AFCWU | 600 | 1 |
Responses to the renewed state offensive
I think that the establishment of these works committees will really deprive these Bantu trade unions of their life blood and any necessity for existence.
[M. ViIjoen, former Minister of Labour, House of Assembly Debates, 1973.]
The introduction of the Bantu Labour Relations Regulations Amendment Act of 1973 demonstrated that the South African ruling class had no intention of loosening its grip over black labour power. In particular, the legislation was designed to strengthen the role of the works or liaison committee system asa substitute for genuine trade unions and full rights of collective bargaining for African workers. The state and employers took the offensive in establishing thousands of works and liaison committees to inhibit the growth of trade unions, further fragment the African labour force and render unified strike action involving more than one factory almost impossible. By March 1978 there were 2,879 registered in-plant committees, over twenty times as many as existed before the Durban strikes. All but approximately 300 of these committees were management controlled.
The African trade union movement manifested varied responses to the modifications introduced by the 1973 legislation, reflecting some of the most basic differences between the groupings.
SACTU's opposition to the committee system was total and uncompromising:
We reject the system of government imposed works and liaison committees as a substitute for free and independent trade unions. This form of worker representation is used to dissipate discontent on the factory floor, and not to provide workers with a weapon which they can use to fight unemployment and low wages. Only trade unions which reflect the will of the workers can effectively serve these ends.
[SACTU Statement.]
The "parallel" unions also rejected the committee system, but chose instead to bargain under the complete dominance of the registered unions, offering themselves up as lambs for the slaughter and betraying the working class interests of their members.
In contrast to most other African trade union groupings, the Urban Training Project / Black Consultative Committee unions have from the beginning worked actively within the committee system. Before 1973, the UTP concentrated on the development of works committees and on the provision of services to workers involved in establishing such committees. After the upsurge in Natal, they changed their policy to include the establishment of African trade unions and linked these closely with the plant committee system. This strategy encourages a very limited form of trade unionism which blends in with, rather than challenges, the state apparatus and reinforces workers' dependency on alternatives to independent trade unions. As has been pointed out many times, organizers who accept the committee system end up disturbing neither management prerogatives nor state policy.
The Western Province Workers' Advice Bureau adopted a significantly more progressive response to the new legislation. This group advocated the formation of works committees but only because they believed the legislation would provide some protection from victimization for workers' leaders and also provide a forum for fundamental worker education.
The position of African workers in the Western Cape differs from other areas and renders these workers vulnerable to increased exploitation. Firstly, the Western Cape has been declared a "coloured labour preference area" since 1966, whereby employers may only take on Africans when there are no "Coloureds" to do the job. Secondly, African migrant workers can no longer obtain residence rights in Cape Town, but because of industrial expansionism the proportion of migrant labourers has actually increased. As these migrant contract workers must return to the Bantustans every year, they are generally given low-paid and unskilled jobs. They also tend to move between factories, thus placing them in a weak position in terms of industrial bargaining power.
The strategy of the WPWAB was to reject industrial unions as inappropriate for African workers in the Western Cape. The numerically stronger coloured workers tended historically to be a conservative force (except in food and canning) and in that context there was a fear that industrial unions for African workers would somehow reproduce bureaucratization within the trade union movement at that time. WPWAB believed that there was a greater need for a more general organization providing workers with a base as they move from job to job or industry to industry and compensating for their lack of bargaining power. In effect they created a general union made up of representatives of all the factories in which they had factory committees.
The WPWAB (later to become the Western Province General Workers Union, WPGWU thus concentrated on establishing factory committees elected by workers in their work place which are then registered as works committees in terms of the legislation. Registration of these committees was seen as increasing the bargaining strength of the workers and providing protection from victimization for committee members. It was not regarded as essential, however, and certainly not as important as a united and democratic committee that maintained links with other such committees. The advice bureau created a controlling committee of elected representatives at establishments which had been organized, thus fulfilling its obj ectives.
Though this strategy of working partly within the Act has received some criticism from various quarters, no one can dispute that a strong representative organization for African workers has been successfully created. The union and some of the factory committees have had bitter struggles with management on a wide range of issues, varying from recognition of works committees, through wages, working conditions and the reinstatement of victimized workers throughout the 1970s.
In more recent years (1979-80) the WPGWU has taken one of the most radical stands regarding the latest Wiehahn labour legislation, refusing to register its union. In two major disputes during 1979 and 1980, involving Cape Town stevedores and meat workers, the Union has also had both strong worker and community support.
Of the various open trade union groupings, the TUACC unions expressed the strongest opposition to the committee system. These unions argued that works committees of all types were part of the apartheid labour system and therefore should be opposed. In their view workers' representatives on works committees tended to become cut off from the workers and began to oppose trade union organization which threatened their personal interests. They also criticized the dependence of other unions on the anti-victimization clause in the 1973 Act, believing that protection of union members depended basically on unity of workers backed by the protection of the Wage Act.
Initially, the TUACC policy meant total non-involvement in the committee system. The unions took part in numerous struggles in which strong factory floor representation opposed management attempts to defuse the growing strength of shop stewards by establishing works or liaison committees. At times, however, a different strategy had to be employed; in a number of plants unions attempted to establish works committees where the union was involved but management cooperation at any level was virtually impossible. This strategy was used to preempt management from establishing liaison committees.
Only limited success was achieved and the shortcomings of this approach were openly acknowledged by the union organizers. One assessment of an attempt to use such an approach by the Chemical Workers Industrial Union at Natal Chemical Syndicate concluded:
Despite the advantages given by union assistance, little of concrete advantage was achieved. A limitation of the strategy was that at times it led workers to misconceive the struggle. They became caught up in committee affairs, neglecting the overall struggle. It did, however, enable the union to sustain a struggle against management, heightening workers' awareness of the repressive strategies of management.
[South African Labour Bulletin, Vol. 4, No. 8, Jan-Feb. 1979, p. 86. ]
Shop floor struggles for recognition
At the end of 1975, in a desperate bid to encourage employers to use the committee system, Minister of Labour ViIjoen quoted figures from 1974 and 1975 which disclosed a dramatic drop in the number of man-hours lost through strikes by black workers since the introduction of the 1973 legislation. The committee system, he said, "could only contribute to a more satisfied labour force and to happier employer-worker relations". Events of the next few months and years were to prove just how incorrect his assessment was.
Throughout the 1970s employers were faced with a counteroffensive on two fronts. Firstly, strikes by African workers, many backed by the new independent unions, continued and intensified as the decade progressed. Secondly, the international community was becoming increasingly alerted to the exploitative conditions which existed for black labour in South Africa, beginning in 1974 with the publishing of a report by a British House of Commons subcommittee on "Wages and Conditions of African Workers Employed by British Firms in South Africa".
In July 1974, the British owned company of Smith & Nephew (based in Durban) became the first company in South Africa to sign an agreement with an unregistered union. Smith & Nephew management agreed to negotiate with both the National Union of Textile Workers (a TUACC union) and the Textile Workers Industrial Union, the registered union representing Indian workers. Though it seemed that other British companies were contemplating recognition of unregistered unions as well, this was to be the ONLY such agreement for several years.
Most employers, however, remained intransigent on the question of recognition of unregistered African trade unions. With the solid support of the state apparatus behind them they fought hard to impose the committee system on their African employees. It is useful to look at some examples of the bitter struggles that were fought over recognition.
1. DOCK WORKERS STRIKE AT NAUTILUS MARINE
In June 1974, the workers of Nautilus Marine (Cape Town ship maintenance contractors) decided to establish a works committee with assistance from the WPWAB. Management refused to allow this, pressing instead for a liaison committee. As the workers refused to participate in the liaison committee and persisted with their demands, management dismissed an employee of nineteen years' standing who had been an active initiator of the calls for a works committee. Attempts by the WPWAB to have this worker reinstated failed. Only after the rest of the workers had participated in three work stoppages did management finally bend to demands for reinstatement and also agree to the formation of a works committee which could be affiliated to the WPWAB.
After this, the relationship between them deteriorated very quickly as management rejected any demands for improvement in wages and working conditions put forward by the committee. Members of the works committee were taken by railway and security police and interrogated about the committee and the Advice Bureau; they were warned to stay away from WPWAB and to stop "making trouble".
In October, almost 300 workers went on strike after management dismissed ten workers, all of them active in the struggle for recognition of the works committee. Workers refused to return to work until their dismissed brothers were reinstated. When the committee asked why the workers had been sacked, they were told it was none of their business but that it was just the beginning and they intended getting rid of a lot more people.
In fact, upon submitting their list of grievances to management they were informed that all workers were dismissed, including the contract labourers destined for deportation to the -homelands". The railway police were called in to ensure that the workers dispersed immediately. Many of those entitled to seek other work in the area found employment. However, those whom management branded as "agitators" or "troublemakers" had great difficulty in securing jobs; Nautilus personnel officers and the security police actively discouraged other employers from accepting them.
This illustrates some of the difficulties facing the WPWAB in trying to organize workers even within the limits of the legislation.
2. THE NATAL COTTON AND WOOLLEN MILLS CONFRONTATION
Many of the major strikes by African workers during the mid-1970s were supported by the TUACC unions, particularly the National Union of Textile Workers (NUTW) and the Metal and Allied Workers Union (MAWU). Demands centred on trade union recognition and improved wages and working conditions.
Probably the biggest and most bitter dispute ever between workers of Natal Cotton and their employers broke out in October 1975. Unlike most of the Frame Group factories, Natal Cotton was not touched by the strike wave of 1973 and in fact compared favourably with Frame in terms of wages and working conditions. However, the "paternalism" of this employer gradually changed to rigid anti-unionism as the two unions representing workers (the TWIU representing Indian workers, and the NUTW African members) began to press for various and legitimate demands.
A new tough-line personnel officer (brother of the head of the Durban Security Branch) was brought into the ranks of management. Further, it seems that he was hired to establish forcibly a liaison committee and drive out the unregistered union. The tactics used to carry out this task included insulting the workers and trying to keep out the union organizer, Chris Albertyn. In addition, he began establishing a network of infactory spies and encouraged both police and security police to harass selected workers. When management took no steps to adjust matters, workers eventually refused to work with him and demanded his dismissal. Management reacted ruthlessly to this demand and locked all workers out for one week. Workers refused for two weeks to consider working while the personnel officer was still employed; more than 450 Indian and African workers were united in their stand.
Finally, union officials negotiated a settlement following an industrial council meeting where management made it clear that they would terminate the personnel officer's services soon after the workers returned to work. He was dismissed two months later but the price paid by both the workers and the union was extremely high. Approximately 150 workers were fired and aggressive interrogation of workers continued for months afterwards. The aim was to prepare a body of affidavits stating that Albertyn primarily incited workers to strike and to prove that no problems existed in the factory before the union came in.
In March 1976, Chris Albertyn and John Copelyn, organizer and branch secretary of the TW1U, and Junerose Nala and Thizi Khumalo, organizers for NUTW, were charged by the state for inciting to strike. In May, Nala was detained under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act and was not released until December. Obed Zuma of NUTW was also detained until December, leaving no experienced organizer to try to rebuild at Natal Cotton and Woollen Mills. Finally, in November 1976, Copelyri, Albertyn and five other organizers in TUACC unions were banned. These included Alpheus Mthetwa, general secretary of MAWU, Sipho Kubheka, secretary of the Johannesburg branch, and Gavin Anderson, MAWU organizer. In 1980, John Copelyn was the only one of this group whose ban was lifted. Security legislation and labour legislation were jointly used to destroy the union and its activities on behalf of the workers.
This is how the apartheid ruling class deals with black workers who struggle for basic trade union rights; both employers and the state work in collusion to protect profits and to suppress any attempts to organize and defend workers against heightened conditions of exploitation. The supportive function of the union was crucial in this period to bolster solidarity and perseverance in the face of concerted attempts by state and capital to destroy the unity of striking workers.
3 VICTIMIZATION OF WORKERS AT HEINEMANN ELECTRIC COMPANY
Once again, in March 1976, the world was shocked by the vicious methods of repression used by employers and the police against workers involved in a dispute at Heinemann Electric, a subsidiary of Heinemann, USA. These 600 African workers, members of MAWU (TUACC) were demanding the recognition of their union and had repeatedly rejected the governmentbacked liaison and works committees.
There had been a liaison committee imposed upon the workers but it was considered impotent and ceased to exist by January 1976. At the same time support for MAWU had been growing and by the end of January, 75 per cent of the work force were members of the Union.
Management refused to recognize the union and exerted pressure on the workers to elect members to a new liaison committee. In three ballots held in February and March, no more than 27 workers could be persuaded to vote. The management then dismissed 20 workers, believed to be the leaders of the trade union, on Thursday 25 March. The next day it gave notice of dismissal to the entire work force and said it would consider re-employing the workers if they complied with company regulations.
On Monday, 29 March, all but ten of the workers refused to collect their wages or work, demanding reinstatement. At the request of the management, forty policemen arrived at the factory and brutally attacked the workers as they were peacefully dispersing. The Rand Daily Mail reported:
Suddenly a horde of policemen with sticks and dogs descended on the crowd. Chaos reigned.
Mr Gavin Anderson, who has been acting as secretary of the workers' union, was standing next to me. A number of policemen rained blows on him. He fell and couldn't get up. He was hit again. He had to be lifted to his feet and he was led to a police truck.
Meanwhile, people were fleeing in all directions. Police hit everybody and everything before them. Reporters were threatened and the car I was in was dented after kicks and sticks had rained on it.
Several people were bitten by dogs. A woman, about seven months pregnant, was struck by a policeman wielding a stick resembling a pick handle.
She lay still. Some workers hid in the bushes.
Press reports indicated that 29 persons had been severely injured by the attacking police.
This incident demonstrated how those employers who would not recognize the legitimate aspirations of workers in their attempt to gain meaningful negotiation rights could only resort to punitive action and vicious repression. Without recourse to such repressive forces, management would be pressured into negotiations with African workers and their unions.
This repression continued: two union officials, Sipho Kubheka. secretary, and Gavin Anderson. organizer, were charged with inciting a strike and with obstructing police in their duty (charged under the 1973 Act, the Industrial Conciliation Act, the Riotous Assemblies Act and the Police Act). Four Heinemann workers were also arrested and charged under the Riotous Assemblies Act, the 1973 Black Labour Relations Act and the IC Act.
Heinemann continued its campaign to instigate a liaison committee, refusing to re-employ workers unless they would support such a committee. Management was thus compelled to hire over 300 new workers who were forced to participate in liaison committee elections.
Barlow Rand, parent company of Heinemann, issued a statement following the March incident, indicating that the group would not recognize unregistered African trade unions:
We feel obliged to negotiate within the framework created by law and cannot opt out of industrial agreements which apply to the whole industry. This does not imply that we are happy with the existing industrial relations legislation. We believe it needs drastic revision.
[Quoted in Rand Daily Mail, 3 April 1976.]
The fact remained, however, that employers could recognize these trade unions - it was not illegal to do so but in fact entirely within the law. In pronouncing judgment on the strikers found guilty of inciting to strike, the magistrate said that organizing an unregistered trade union was inherently a political act given the existence of the "Bantu" labour relations system. In South Africa, to engage in mass action in defiance of employers and the state does indeed constitute political action. Yet throughout this particular dispute, the workers remained disciplined and avoided confrontation even in the face of police brutality.
4. ARMOURPLATE SAFETY GLASS - THE MYTH OF THE "RIGHT TO STRIKE"
A glaring example of the unwillingness of employers or the state to enter into negotiations with independent trade unions is represented by the strike carried out by African glass workers between September and November 1976. This was the first legal strike by African workers in South Africa.
Armourplate Glass, a subsidiary of Pilkington Bros, England, employed approximately 200 African workers, 180 of whom belonged to the Glass and Allied Workers Union - a UTP union. GAWU was established at the plant in April 1975, and because management claimed it would only deal with a works committee, workers elected their representatives to sit on such a committee. All committee members belonged to the union.
In July 1976, management consulted the works committee on the subject of the effects of the current recession and asked workers to agree to a four-day week in order to avoid reduction of staff - to which they agreed. Ten days later, three workers (one of whom was a committee representative) were fired because of "bad record cards". The committee was informed that the dismissals were none of its business, but they contended that the dismissal was a violation of the spirit of the agreement.
Workers decided to commence a legal strike, informing management and asking them to inform the Bantu labour officer. It was confirmed that workers could carry out a legal strike as from 23 September (thirty days later) if the matter was not settled by then. The final decision to strike was to be put to the workers on 6 September.
On that day, intimidation and harassment of workers began in earnest. The 180 workers sent the committee to talk with Mr Fitzhenry, the manager. Meanwhile, outside the factory, police warned the union secretary and organizer standing there that they should disperse as they were contravening the Riotous Assemblies Act ban on gatherings. As the chairman of the committee entered the manager's office he noticed three strange men sitting beside Fitzlienry. On the table in front of each of the three men was a revolver! When the manager refused to meet with the whole committee and said he would meet only with the chairman, Ephraim Mabena, the committee withdrew. Later the Bantu labour officer brought the manager to the committee and announced that the firm would not be prepared to reinstate the workers.
Management stated that those employees who were prepared to work could remain and the rest could go home and return the following day to collect their pay. All but five of the workers walked out. The next day when workers returned to collect their pay they found the factory gates locked. As police were present and in view of the ban on gatherings, they decided to return home. The company subsequently claimed that the strikers had resigned and so the workers decided that no one should collect their pay until the position had been clarified.
During the next two weeks both the union and the works committee continued to make efforts to try to persuade management to negotiate a return to work, but their approaches were in vain. On 23 September, the first day on which the strike became legal, the workers staged a picket outside the factory. Despite the fact that the pickets were walking at deliberately long intervals along the pavement, 27 of the strikers were arrested for constituting an illegal gathering in terms of the Riotous Assemblies Act; they were summarily tried and convicted within a few hours.
As the weeks dragged on, management maintained its stance of refusing to negotiate. "As all the employees have resigned, we don't have a works committee at this stage. There is nobody to negotiate with," they announced. In mid-October, the union asked the director of the Institute for Industrial Relations to mediate in the dispute, but this too was refused by the Pilkington bosses.
On 1 November 1976, eight weeks after the strike began, the strikers met to consider the company's rejection of the suggested mediation and to consider their next move. They decided to go to the factory, collect their money and refuse reengagement. They gave these reasons:
On 2 November, the strikers went to the factory, had their passes signed off, collected outstanding pay and pension money and refused to apply for reinstatement.
The strikers at Armourplate were assisted with money and food by workers in the Pilkington factory, and branches of other unions in the area. Donations also came from the Engineering and Allied Workers Union, the Laundry Workers Association and the National Union of Motor Assembly Workers.
The British Trades Union Congress (TUC) was asked to assist and on several occasions the General and Municipal Workers Union (covering glass workers at the parent firm in England) approached management, all unsuccessful. Through the union, the glass workers donated money - specifically to help strikers pay rent and electricity. Significant donations also came from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC).
Throughout the 8-week long strike, the spirit of the workers remained unbroken. Most attended a meeting of strikers held each weekday and night. Their sufferings were considerable but the workers said that even should they lose the struggle, they felt they had taught management a lesson that would not soon be forgotten. They believed that things would be better for black workers in the future and were proud to be able to give black workers in general an example of what unity can achieve.
In summarizing the results of the Armourplate strike, the Glass and Allied Workers Union released the following statement to the press in November 1976:
The executive committee of the Glass and Allied Workers Union has issued the following comments on the strike by black workers at Armourplate Safety Glass, Springs, which lasted eight weeks from 6 September to 1 November 1976.
- This strike has shown that black workers have courage to take severe but disciplined and orderly action in the face of injustice. For this they needed the backing and support of their trade union.
- The right to strike is a mockery without the right to conduct a lawful picket and without trade union organization to assist members with their legal struggle and with the establishment of the strike fund.
- Employers aregging to have to enter into relations with emerging black unions. Had such a relationship existed in this case the union is confident that the strike could have been avoided.
- Management in South Africa is going to be forced to treat workers with respect and show this by being prepared to negotiate with black workers through their trade union on all issues.
- Any management that allows a comparatively small issue to blow up into one of major proportions as this did, will have to take a good look at the education of management in sound industrial relations.
- The union which has been trying for two years to enter into a relationship with Pilkington Brothers, the parent company of Armourplate, is still prepared to extend the hand of friendship to the company.
This strike turned into the most prolonged strike by African workers for a long time; the 200-odd workers held out for over eight weeks, causing some 11,070 striker-days lost time to the company. The GAWU (one of the "legalistic" unions) supported the workers only after all the precise legal conditions for a strike had been met. Despite these attempts at legality, management remained intransigent and with the help of the police finally broke the strike.
Although these unions rarely became so directly involved in a dispute, during this strike (with UTP assistance) they provided an important organizational focus through which the unity of strikers was maintained, pressure on management sustained, legal defence provided and families assisted financially.
Throughout this period, faced with workers' demands that challenged their authority and threatened the existing economic and political order, the state and employers responded with concerted attempts to crush strike action and destroy worker solidarity. Employers usually relied on the state machinery to deal with labour disputes while refusing to have anything to do with the independent unions, which they regarded as "third parties" or "not interested parties in the company's affairs". Clearly, the state did have an interest in the company's affairs, however. Through the department of labour, the police and security forces, the state has demonstrated its consistent willingness to jump to the call by the bosses and assist in crushing workers' resistance. In fact, the support of the Labour Department is not in itself sufficient for capital, as they lack the power to act decisively, i.e. coercively - against striking workers. Hence we see a more central pattern of relying on the police, both criminal and security sections, to quell the workers and "settle" disputes.
This kind of three-pronged attack by management, police and the department of labour was mostly carried out against the TUACC unions in this period. It was these unions which had considerably more experience of strike action than other groupings and responded most often to the spontaneous strikes by African workers. While the strikes which were supported and led by them were not expressly political, in all cases they either challenged the existing state wage control system, the "Bantu labour relations" institutions or involved a demand for recognition of independent trade unions of African workers. By doing so, these unions were exposed to the most severe repression, resulting in the detention of numerous organizers and union members and the banning of others.
Soweto - the mass uprisings of 1976
If we get the parents on our side, we can call out a strike; if we call out a strike the economy will collapse; if the economy collapses we will have black rule in 1977.
[Quoted in A. Brooks and J. Brickhill, Whirlwind Before the Storm, IDAF, 1980, p. 198.]
The mass uprisings beginning in Soweto on 16 June 1976 and spreading throughout South Africa for the next six months advanced the struggle of the black working class to even greater heights.
From 1973 to 1976, African workers had concentrated their struggle against individual employers at the point of production and consistently fought for recognition of their newly-formed independent trade unions. Now, in a massive display of solidarity in the face of apartheid brutality, workers joined the student uprisings and took part in highly successful political general strikes (or Stay-at-Homes) reminiscent of those called by the Congress Alliance in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
On 16 June, when the school children demonstrated peacefully in Soweto against the oppressive system of "Bantu education", they were murdered in the streets by the South African police. Although they returned to the streets again and again, they realized that without the support of the working people they lacked the means to strike an effective blow at the total system. They appealed for support from the labour force on which the whole capitalist economy rests - their parents, friends and relatives - and when these workers began to withdraw their labour en masse, the entire struggle was raised to a higher level.
On two separate occasions, in August and in September 1976, black workers successfully carried out three-day Stay-at-Homes which brought industry to a standstill, particularly in Johannesburg and Cape Town. It is estimated that during the second Stay-at-Home the total number involved rose to almost threequarters of a million throughout the country. Pamphlets issued by students made reference to the Heinemann strike (see above) as a reason for workers coming out on strike during the August Stay-at-Home.
The strikes were significant for various reasons. Firstly, a massive number of workers were prepared to withdraw their labour in spite of the threat not only of arrest, beatings and shooting by the police, but also of mass dismissal from their jobs. Unemployed workers faced the additional threat of deportation to the -homelands".
Secondly, the strikes were conducted with skill, discipline and maturity by a working class which had been largely deprived of open political leadership and organization for more than a decade. Thirdly, it was significant in that thousands of coloured workers - mostly women - stood by their African brothers and sisters in refusing to go to work.
Finally, it was the strike action on the part of black workers which really shattered the confidence of the regime and of the capitalist class. In carrying out these actions, the oppressed masses realized the nature of the political strike as a powerful weapon. Unlike regular strikes which are directed against individual employers or a group of employers, the political strike is directed against employers as a class and the state as an instrument of their interests. As SACTU's official organ, Workers Unity, stated in 1977:
(The oppressed people) are showing what apartheid really means to the majority of black people - to the workers and working-class youth. It means far more than racism, far more than discrimination on grounds of colour. It means far more than just the denial of democratic rights or the humiliation of inequality. To the working people, apartheid is part and parcel of the system which exploits them economically. It holds them in utter poverty, it controls their every movement through the pass laws and contract system, and it yokes them as mere oxen of labour in the service of the capitalist class.
[No. 1, Jan. 1977, p. 1.]
The oppressed masses were on the move again. South Africa had been shaken by this tremendous upsurge of resistance and the international community shocked by the regime's callous response. This brutality included the murder in detention of two working class militants - Luke Mazwembe, an organizer for the WPWAB, and Lawrence Ndzanga, SACTU national executive committee member. Following the uprisings and the Stay-at-Homes in August- September 1976, the biggest crackdown on trade unionists since the banning of SACTU leaders in the early 1960s occurred. Twenty-four trade unionists actively involved in organizing African workers were banned.
And yet, in the midst of all the bloodshed and murder, Prime Minister Vorster, who had been interned during World War 11 as a Nazi sympathizer, tried to placate the fears of international capital and the ruling white minority by announcing: "THERE IS NO CRISIS!"
Vorster's "no crisis" line was a hopeless, but necessary, attempt to persuade the international (capitalist) community that all (profit and investment) was well inside South Africa. It failed. All was not well, and things were getting worse. Streets were filled with a revolutionary spirit and determination that could not be denied or hidden behind government pronouncements to the foreign press. First, black students, then their working parents, soon the entire black community, and even a large number of white supporters - the people of South Africa marched forward with a unity and confidence not seen since the Congress Alliance campaigns of the 1950s. The regime had but one option: to deploy the state's physical apparatus in a show of brutal force. The outcome is well known: over a thousand (mostly school children) killed in the short space of a few weeks.
Had the crisis consisted only of the political dimension, perhaps the apartheid regime might have weathered another storm, albeit at a great cost of human life and international condemnation. However, it was also one that emanated from the basic structure of the apartheid capitalist economy. These inter-related political and economic aspects of the crisis brought a hitherto unprecedented level of anxiety to ruling class circles. New strategies had to be devised, and quickly, if national oppression and capitalist exploitation were to be rescued.
The earliest indications of an imminent change in modern-day apartheid tyranny surfaced back in 1973, when the South African white paper on defence warned that government policy was not "to base our national defence on military capacity alone". Two years later, the 1975 white paper added that "all countries need to muster all their activities, including political, economic and diplomatic, for their defence". By 1977, in the immediate wake of the national uprisings a year earlier, the government articulated its Total National Strategy which was to be "formulated at the highest level" in order to guarantee that the -maintenance of the sovereignty of the Republic of South Africa is the combined responsibility of all government departments".
Total Strategy entails a significant escalation of the militarization of the entire South African society - but it is much more than that! Total Strategy constitutes an essential restructuring and intensification of social control in all dominant spheres of everyday life. Or, as one high ranking officer in the South African Defence Forces put it: "We already exist in political, economic, ideological and military circumstances usually associated with war." The battle field for Total Strategy was in every arena where white minority rule in South Africa and Namibia could be strengthened or, to put it differently, where national oppression and labour exploitation of the black majority could be increased.
It is most important to understand that virtually all of these measures are in response to what became a serious economic crisis of profitability in the mid-1970s. Only by providing an outline of this economic crisis can we hope to make sense of the new and more repressive initiatives coming out of the Wiehahn and Riekert Commissions analysed in following sections.
Expansion and recession
To begin with, South African economic growth has developed since the 1920s as though immune from the usual ups and downs of capitalist business cycles. Reinforced by a plentiful supply of gold (produced by cheap, black labour), South Africa's mining sector guaranteed an ability to purchase technology necessary for a modern industrial economy. Mechanization proceeded at a faster rate in South Africa than in most capitalist countries, and certainly at a pace that distinguished South Africa from the surrounding underdevelopment of the third world periphery. State revenues also came largely from the mining industry, thus allowing the government to invest heavily in the development of modern infrastructure (electricity and iron and steel) compatible with the interests of private monopoly capital.
The secret behind this continuous expansion of the economy has always been the gross exploitation of the black working class. Throughout this century profit rates in South Africa have attracted a steady stream of foreign investment capital from Europe and North America - capital ready to move in like vultures to rob the people of the surpluses created under conditions of unfree labour. As late as 1974, the average American corporation received an 18 percent return on its South African investment as compared with a return of only 8 per cent in Britain. Between 1973 and 1974, direct foreign investment in South Africa rose nearly 20 per cent, totalling R6,694 million.
The international recession which hit the world capitalist system in the mid-1970s became for the apartheid economy a severe structural crisis with serious implications for the maintenance of racist rule. The price of gold fell in 1975 and South Africa was soon to experience a massive balance of trade deficit as it continued to have to pay for capital goods imported from western nations. Between 1974 and 1976 the government's total foreign debt increased from R808 million to R1,317 million. Simultaneously, the political instability of the mid-1970s - itself in large part a consequence of increasing economic suffering as black unemployment skyrocketed - led to a precipitous decline in foreign investment capital. The vultures of imperialism began to look elsewhere in search of easy prey.
South African Reserve Bank figures show a reduction in the inflow of long-term foreign investment from R1,561 million in 1975-6 to R452 million in 1976-7. When coupled with the actual net outflow of short-term capital from the private sector, the year 1976-7 shows a total capital inflow of R1,635 million in 1974-5. By the end of 1976, a negative growth rate in the real gross national product of 1 per cent meant that the economy had actually declined in size; the year 1976-7 saw a total capital outflow of some R121 million. Major state investment projects in steel, petrochemicals and other sectors had to be abandoned or deferred. The Iranian Revolution added to the economic crisis as South Africa's major source of oil was suddenly cut off by the new government in Iran.
Along with these crucial indices of economic crisis should be added: (a) a 100 per cent increase in military spending owing to South Africa's determination to reverse the process of national liberation in the African sub-continent; (b) an increase in under-utilized plant capacity to 16.3 per cent in the manufacturing sector by February 1977; (c) a difficulty in arranging long-term international bank loans due to the risks of such investments and also pressure exerted by anti-apartheid organizations throughout the world; and (d) a tight monetary and fiscal policy that reduced the rate of profits from over 19 per cent to just over 8 per cent throughout the economy by the early months of 1977.
The rapid economic growth of the 1960s, which had been possible only after the brutal suppression of the Congress Movement, became by the mid-1970s a vicious circle of falling profit rates, a shattered imperialist confidence, and correspondingly lower levels of foreign investment. For the black working class this meant immediate social dislocation and intense hardship. By 1979, an estimated 2.5 million African workers had become part of the reserve army of unemployed - as compared with one million at the beginning of the decade. This mass of excess labour power is the new "Bantustan citizenry- subject to constant harassment, misery and supervision under the system of influx controls.
To recover from the economic crisis, profit rates must rise to an acceptable level in a stable political climate in order once again to attract foreign capital investment. The most obvious (capitalist) solution would be to lower overall labour costs, but to understand how this is to be accomplished in South Africa requires another brief return to the decade of the 1960s.
The "floating colour bar"
The boom years of economic growth and the rise of monopoly capitalism managed to offset and conceal an internal contradiction inherent in the racial structure of South African production. Generally speaking, a rigid "colour bar" - sometimes legislated, sometimes negotiated between management and white trade unions, occasionally customary - meant that skilled, supervisory and professional work was reserved for Whites. Black workers were restricted to positions below Whites at lower paid, unskilled and semi-skilled jobs. As the economy expanded and with more capital intensive investment there emerged a significant shortage of skilled labour. There simply were not (and still are not) sufficient numbers of Whites to occupy the positions necessary to maintain, not to mention expand, production and circulation of commodities. Government figures in 1977 showed vacancies for 99,000 workers in professional, semi-professional and technical grades of work. Also, if the economy conforms to predicted growth rates for this decade, there will be a shortage of 1,448 ' 000 "white-collar- workers by 1990 - unless, that is, the racial division of labour is significantly altered.
Instead of eliminating these colour bars in industry during the 1960s, the capitalist class and the state attempted to resolve the dilemma by (a) encouraging the immigration of skilled Whites from developed capitalist nations, and (b) engaging in a practice known as "job dilution---. The latter is a process whereby white workers receive wage/salary increases and promotions to higher (usually supervisory) positions in the labour hierarchy in exchange for allowing Blacks to perform certain work or occupy certain positions previously restricted to Whites only. The former work position is, however, simultaneously fragmented, reclassified or "diluted" in such a way that Blacks are brought in to perform newly mechanized manual functions at lower wage rates. This practice has also been referred to as "the floating colour bar".
Large inflows of foreign capital investment before the crisis allowed the employers to "get by" with this rather inefficient and time-consuming process during the 1960s. The economic stagnation of the 1970s, however, made the capitalist class as a whole realize that the entire racial division of labour would have to be modified substantially if profit rates were to be increased. In 1972, supplementary measures were introduced by the state that accelerated the pace at which the colour bar was "floated". Leading capitalists, including the so-called liberal Harry Oppenheimer, were quick to point out that the white workers would not be disadvantaged by these moves. To quote Oppenheimer in 1970:
Nor should it be thought that better jobs and better pay for the African majority would be bought at the expense of the European workers. On the contrary African advancement could certainly make possible much more rapid advancement for the Europeans also... We are in the position that we can maintain this system and allow the whole structure to float upwards so that everyone benefits. (emphasis added)
[Quoted in R. First et al., The South African Connection, Penguin, 1973, p. 66.]
By the mid-1970s, however, highly placed businessmen admitted that floating the colour bar, at whatever pace, was too costly and far too inefficient. "Political unrest" (as mass uprisings are described in ruling circles), associated with the fact that return on investment was now higher in at least two other African nations (Nigeria and Libya) than South Africa, made the capitalist class realize that more drastic measures would be necessary.
The restructuring of the racial division of labour
In sum, the interim solution - prior to implementation of the Wiehahn and Rickert Commissions' recommendations -has been to scrap some of the colour bars entirely and thus allow Blacks to do jobs previously reserved for Whites. Yet only a small proportion of the black working class could possibly benefit from these changes. Why? Because in the course of restructuring the racial division of labour, capital is also introducing new technology that effectively "deskills" and makes redundant a large mass of manual labour. In turn, this results in even higher unemployment levels for black workers generally, while simultaneously creating a certain number of specialized, supervisory positions and "mental" occupations available to a minority of these workers. In effect, the overall wage bill is to be lowered as Blacks are paid at rates well below those Whites received for doing the same work in the past. As the value of labour power (the wage) is reduced, profits will increase accordingly.
Such a move also has great political significance in that it represents an eleventh hour strategy by the apartheid ruling class to create a black middle class to act as a buffer in the class struggle. (This will be discussed in greater detail when we consider the Riekert Commission.) Such a modification of the racial hierarchy in production was evidenced in December 1977, when the government scrapped eighteen Job Reservations that had been scheduled under Section 77 of the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1956. Six months later, in June 1978, employers and registered unions in the steel and engineering sectors agreed to eliminate the -closed shop" which barred African workers from certain grades of work.
These piecemeal alterations were however only suggestive of changes that would be advanced by the Wiehahn and Riekert Commissions in 1979. These two Commissions must be analysed as two aspects of one ruling class response to the range of crises - economic, political and international - that characterized South African society in the 1970s. This review of these profound and inter-related problems, although somewhat superficial, should be sufficient for us to comprehend the Total Strategy as it relates to the labour front (the Wiehahn mandate) and the black community at large (the Riekert mandate). We will now turn to an examination of these Commissions.
"When I use a word, " Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more nor less. "
"The question is", said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things.---
"The question is", said Humpty Dumpty, "who is to be master. That is all."
[Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.]
Faced with the rise of independent black trade unionism, an economic crisis that was structural (rather than cyclical) in nature, and heightened international pressure for change after the Soweto uprisings, the apartheid regime appointed two extremely important Commissions in 1977. The Wiehahn Commission, named after its chairman Prof. Nic Wiehahn, was assigned the task of investigating the country's labour legislation; in August,. one month later, the Riekert Commission was charged with investigating "manpower utilization- - a euphemism for regulations concerning the rights of employment, residence and mobility of the African people.
Almost as soon as these Commissions had begun their inquiries, considerable speculation emerged as to their likely recommendations. On the one hand, opponents of apartheid anticipated new and more efficient measures of control in the interest of enhancing domination by capital and the racist regime. On the other hand, international monopoly capital and western governments anxiously awaited with guarded enthusiasm the government's promise of significant "reformsthat would prove that -apartheid as you know it is dying&q