THE LABOUR QUESTION.

Wanganui Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 160796, 2 November 1920, Page 4

THE LABOUR QUESTION.

The position of Labour in South Africa—white labour, that is—is radically different from what it is in other parts of the Empire, and it is this which is to a great extent responsible for the apprehension and the exaggerated view of the ruling classes regarding it. In South Africa the white workers are the smaller proportion of the labour world. The great majority of the workers are , coloured either negroes or Indians, who are looked on as a menial race and treated accordingly. This view of the labourer as an inferior naturally leads to his work being looked on as ignoble also, and by an easy mental process, not only his but all manual work becomes looked on in the same light. Indeed, so much is physical work held in contempt in South Africa that a white man cannot nail up a loose picket in his fence or push a mower round his lawn without giving offence to his neighbours and losing the respect of the blacks. That appears incredible to a New .Zealander, still it is so. •Consequently when the subject and menial element show signs of restlessness, and a desire to better themselves, they are looked on as forgetting their place and as needing a lesson- And this is bad for the white worker in South Africa. He is usually a skilled tradesman, therefore on a far higher level than the black. But the stigma which attaches to labour In South Africa affects him also, and when he agitates for better conditions he also is looked upon as a person who is forgetting his place, and he also is looked upon as This accounts very largely for the way In which the political Labour movement is regarded in South Africa by the land-owning and trading classes, and explains how it is that many of the latter, while liberal enough in -their general views, have no democratic spirit. In fact, a Liberal without being a Democrat fairly accurately sums up, not only General Smuts, hut nine-tenths of both the South' African and the Nationalist parties. And this unfounded fear is. without- doubt, at the bottom of the recent attempts to unite these two partes against a Bolshevism whose existence is very doubtful, and the attempts at unity hiving been fruitless, this fear now prompts the proposal of desperation put forward for the mixing of , oil and jyater, otherwise' a quite impossible nonracial party .j