White South Africa has had its biggest shock since the Sharpeville massacre, ten years ago. Defying the laws which deny them the right to strike, tens of thousands of African workers in Durban walked off their jobs. The y have now returned to work. Their gains are small. The Durban municipal workers demanded £5 a week - they got E1. This brings their average weekly pay - before deductions - to £7.50. Some of the men will get as little as E3.50. This despite the fact that the official "poverty line" in South Africa has been fixed (and "fixed" is the right word) at E1l.
WORSE Conditions in Durban and in Natal generally are just a little bit worse than in the rest of the apartheid republic. The Sunday Telegraph (Feb. 11) reports the case of a company which doubled its profits last year but whose basic pay rates were about 8 rand a week (about £4.40), out of which the worker has to pay about £1.10 to travel to work. (Under apartheid laws, black workers have to live outside the "white" urban areas, far away from their place of work.) The Johannesburg Financial Mail cites the Frame Group, an industrial complex whose directors are very closely connected with the South African government. This group is paying an average rate of £13.50 a month to Africans. Last year the pre-tax profit of one of its companies jumped by per percent Police clubbing striking worker:
to £1,250,000.
In South Africa the iron law of capitalism operates in all its naked savagery where Afri can workers are concerned. In order to squeeze the maximum surplus value out of the workers, their labour power is purchased, where possible, for below its value - ie.
the cost of maintaining the worker and his reproduction. There is always more cheap labour available from the so-called Bantu homelands, which are really nothing more than huge reservoirs of cheap labour. UNIONS Only 2 percent of African workers are or ganised in unions. This is not because Africans do not want to join unions, but is due "mainly to racial discrimination in the law and labour practices; government obstruction and intimidation and colour prejudice among white workers" (Alex Hepple - Workers Under Apartheid).
Although African trade unions are not illegal in South Africa, their activities are hemmed in by so many restrictive laws and regulations that it requires little short of heroism for the notorious Suppression of Communism Act anyone to undertake the organising. Under of 1950, the government can declare any organisation, including African trade unions (but not other unions) "unlawful" on the grounds that it engages in activities calculated to further any of the objects of "communism" as defined in the Act.
African trade
On Tuesday, 20 February, armed policemen whot and killed two young Pakistani workers. The dead workers, Basharat Hussein and