SOUTH AFRICA'S BLACK LABOUR T.U.C. MISSION FROM BRITAIN HAD SIGNIFICANT RECEPTION

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33382, 14 November 1973, Page 16

SOUTH AFRICA'S BLACK LABOUR T.U.C. MISSION FROM BRITAIN HAD SIGNIFICANT RECEPTION

(By

DAVID LOSHAK.

in Cape Town, writing to the "Daily Telegraph." London.) (Reprinted by arrangement)

When a bunch of “Communistic” labour leaders with a notorious history of “political irresponsibility” are allowed to come “poking their noses” into the internal affairs of a suspicious and fearful society such as South Africa’s, it is a sign that some tilings may be changing more than many people would have thought possible in the land of supposedly unyielding apartheid.

The two-week visit of a Trade Union Congress (T.U.C.) team led by Mr Victor Feather and Mr Jack Jones marks an extraordinary concession in principle by the Afrikaner establishment.

After all, the phrases just quoted, “Communistic” and the others, are epithets which have been publicly used in establishment media against the T.U.C. mission. When the visit to South Africa was mooted, earlier this year, after the controversy over “starvation wages” allegedly paid by some British firms to black workers, Mr Vorster’s Government made it plain that it would not welcome any outside interference in domestic matters. Finally, the general understanding in South Africa was that if a T.U.C. delegation did come, it would stick to fact-finding on the wages issue. Mr Feather, however, in his no-nonsense Bradford fashion, put all such preconceptions to flight within minutes of his own touchdown at Johannesburg Airport. The team had not come to look at wages, he said, but to examine the whole question of full trade union rights for black workers. Not only that: the T.U.C. would actually be ready to give moral, and possibly material, help. Invited back That the Government, politically so hostile to the known views of the T.U.C. men, even the Right-wingers among them, and as antiBritish Afrikaners still deeply troubled by Boer War resentments and memories of internment in the Second World War, should not only allow such intervention but actually encourage it, is of major significance. Furthermore, the influential Afrikaanse Handels Instituut, representing some of the most powerful employers, has invited the T.U.C. back. The delegation’s report, due in December, is thus likely to have far-reach-ing effects on the South African labour scene. A pressing concern has undoubtedly been South African anxiety over a resolution passed at the International Labour Organisation’s Geneva conference in June. This called for a world

boycott of South African goods. Clearly, as Britain is South Africa’s biggest trading partner, this would damage both countries. Mr Feather's team and Mr Vorster’s, therefore, had a mutual interest in co-operating to avoid it. The T.U.C. can be expected, of course, to continue to make the “right” moral noises about South Africa. At the same time, no trade union leader will readily put the bread and butter of his followers at risk for the sake of an abstract anti-apartheid principle. British jobs would be imperilled if trade with South Africa were cut. For their part, the South Africans had several good reasons not to antagonise the T.U.C. team. There was not only the International Labour Organisation threat to trade, but also the fact that nearly three-quarters of all South African industry is foreignowned. Much of this is British investment and this could give the T.U.C. a direct means of exerting pressure. South Africa also fears that an antagonised British trade union movement might discourage or seek to prevent the emigration of skilled whites to South Africa, immigrants the country sorely needs. But South Africa faces deeper, long-term problems on the industrial front. These go to the roots of the apartheid system which contains the central unresolvable paradox that, while it enforces racial separation, the economy is indivisible and the races, in practice, are not only inseparable but interdependent. For many years, Nationalist Governments, charged with the fervour of Verwoerdian dogma, have ignored the implications of this and economic circumstances have allowed them, until now, to do so. They have been able to stick to job reservation and notions such as Africans being by nature unsuited to trade unionism, or being too

backward to be trained, or that they must be denied equal pay for equal work. Home to roost A surge of new factors has brought the chickens home to roost. Growing African unrest, exemplified most dramatically in the mass African strike at Durban last February but shown also in a wave of illegal (but, significantly, unprosecuted) stoppages elsewhere, is a sign that black workers have too much economic power to ignore, or to crush. There has, too, been the ' growing external pressure already outlined. But above all there is the fact that South Africa is approaching the end of an economic cul de sac. White labour resources are exhausted. Unless blacks are brought in at ever higher levels the economy must stagnate. this has profound implications for South Africa’s development. Census figures show that economic forces are drawing more and more blacks into the “white” economy, in total contradiction of the policy of territorial segregation. Both the white unions, tartly admonished by Mr Feather for their conservatism, and the Government, are gradually coming round to an understanding that their security no longer lies in constricting protectionism, such as job reservation, but in expansion, more employment opportunities for blacks and whites, and steadily rising living standards for all. Softer official line For these reasons, there is, suddenly, a much softer official line on the use of nonwhite labour in key jobs and a much greater readiness to allow that black workers should receive fairer pay. The white-black pay gap is still enormous: in the public sector it is 560 per cent, and this tends to increase rather than diminish because pay rises are made in percentage terms. But the Government has stressed there is nothing to prevent blacks being paid more. At the same time, Mr Vorster has told employers that they may take steps to improve the productive use of non-white labour. For the first time, blacks have been given the right, albeit extremely limited, to go on strike. And the Prime Minister told the T.U.C. that he wanted to see greater collective bargaining for black workers, provided it developed in an orderly way. The value of the British T.U.C. to the South African Government is that it can give its seal of approval to such changes, and perhaps even assist black workers to acquire collective bargaining rights. For it is surely in the whites’ own interests that black labour gets some stake in the system, is encouraged to be “responsible” rather than radical, and is diverted from the extremes of black consciousness and Black Power. The alternative to blacks being brought in, alongside white workers, into the existing industrial framework, judiciously reformed, could be total disruption through an explosion of pent-up African aspiration. Powerful brakes As always, there are powerful brakes inside Afrikanerdom on the forces of change. These are personified in Mr Marais Viljoen, Minister of Labour, who has insistently rejected all ideas of ending job reservation or giving union rights to blacks. But even he acknowledges the need to bridge such communication gaps in labour relations as led to the Carletonville mine shootings in September. None of this means that apartheid itself is dying. In ensuring work for whites at the expense of blacks, it was a means to an end, now achieved. But as a philosophy and a way of life suffusing an entire society, it is an end in itself. Blacks, however well paid, will remain resentful because they will remain second-class citizens, actually, non-citizens. Nonetheless, apartheid is changing, and in this the T.U.C has, by a rare stroke of historical irony, played a part.