BUT NOT FOR BREAD ALONE

The consequences of capitalism on the lives of working class people extend beyond the workplace per se. Although workers sell their labour power for only a specified period of time each day and each week, their proletarian status ensures that all aspects of social life are circumscribed by the realities of powerlessness. Under Apartheid in South Africa, Black workers and their families suffer these hardships to a degree unknown by their White working-class counterparts. In particular, workmen's compensation, unemployment and housing constitute three areas of Black proletarian life worthy of specific attention.

The purpose of this section is briefly to demonstrate that South African Congress of Trade unions (SACTU)campaigns were not restricted to quantitative demands for higher wages. Rather, SACTU responded to the needs of workers created by the starvation wage system. In this way, SACTU was rooted in and moved with the consciousness of the people; the political effect was a merging of the economic with the political and a strengthening of the Congress Alliance in its struggle for total liberation from national oppression and class exploitation.

Workmen's Compensation

The April 1962 issue of the Government Gazette reported that £38,202 was owed to 4,800 'missing' workers who were eligible for but had not claimed workmen's compensation. The overwhelming majority were African workers. By 1966-67, 8,730 Africans, or 75 per cent of an those listed as eligible for benefits, were 'missing'. When asked to explain such a seemingly unusual situation, the Workmen's Compensation Commissioner stated, 'there is something about an African - call it superstition if you like - that makes him flee from the job or the place where he is injured on duty.

If he had been honest, the Commissioner, instead of resorting to racist mythology, might have admitted that the real reason that African workers injured on the job had not claimed their compensation was that they had in most cases been 'endorsed out' of the urban area as 'not serving the interests of the White economy'. Furthermore, the lack of proper record-keeping by employers and the WCC in most cases meant that 'Jim No. 5' or 'Tom No. 9' could not be traced. The companies, concerned only with exploiting the African's labour-power, failed to record his surname or address, or even if this were done, failed to pass on the relevant information to the WCC following the injury. In sum, when an African worker is injured in South Africa, physical suffering is accompanied by economic and social dislocation. Even if the injured worker manages to get a medical certificate, he/she would seldom be assigned to a lighter job until recovery; Africans physically unable to do the heaviest work are regarded by White capitalists as expendable and superfluous to the Apartheid economy.

Under the Workmen's Compensation Act of 1941, it is the responsibility of employers to notify the WCC of accidents and industrial diseases. In the case of African workers, this information is to be given to the Department of Bantu Affairs and Development. If this requirement is satisfied, the injured worker has a period of twelve months in which to claim the compensation owed; if this is not done, the Government Gazette then lists the names and claims and after one month all monies return to the state coffers.

As with all labour legislation in South Africa, 'race' is the major variable in the WC Act. Workers may be permanently or temporarily injured, totally or partially injured - both logical distinctions. But workers may also be injured 'as Africans', as distinct from Whites, Coloureds and Indians. Sections 83 and 88 of the Act enumerate special procedures and different (usually lower) rates for African claimants. For example, no compensation is payable to an African if disabled for less than seven days. In the case of death, African workers' dependants are eligible to receive 'one lump sum' payment, the amount of which is determined by the Commissioner; the amount, however, cannot exceed that given for permanent total disability.

In agriculture and mining, special provisions applied. In 1956, the WC Act included farm labourers for the first time, but claims could be made only on injuries resulting from the use of mechanically-driven machinery. In the mines, a new Pneumoconiosis Act in 1956 reduced the compensation available to Africans suffering from miners' diseases (silicosis, phthisis, TB, etc.) to a lump sum of £240. (Previous to that it had been possible to receive almost twice that amount in some cases.) For White workers suffering the same industrial diseases, four grades of compensation reflecting severity provided compensation to dependants, including children up to 18 years of age. In the case of death, African dependants must furthermore prove their eligibility to the Native Affairs Department before the pitiful lump sum payment is granted. In response to the 1956 law, Workers Unity spoke for all African mine workers when it said: 'Africans as a whole will gain nothing. We Africans who get this sickness are sacked at once. We go back to our homes with this little money, and die.

SACTU Head Office and affiliated unions - particularly the FCWU - responded to these appalling conditions by spending countless hours attempting to trace and contact injured Africans eligible for compensation. In addition, the WCC and employers' organizations were approached with the demand that an efficient system of record keeping be instituted immediately. In general, SACTU inquiries were treated with contempt and hostility, particularly by certain mining, engineering and other companies in heavy industries where accidents were more frequent and managements least concerned about ensuring adequate compensation.

SACTU established an excellent series of lectures explaining the provisions of the WC Act and distributed these to all Local Committees and affiliated unions as a stopgap measure designed to inform African workers of their limited rights under the law. As for the law itself, SACTU's 1960 Conference demanded that', compensation for all workers, irrespective of race and sex, be increased, and that disabled workers be given full pay during the time of their absence from employment and without long delays. These demands fell on deaf ears.

As for the so-called 'missing' claimants, a SACTU press release issued in 1962 exposed the hypocrisy of the Commissioner's statement quoted above:

It is remarkable how all trace of African workers is lost when money is due to them in spite of the fact that they are heavily tagged by passes, thumb-prints, identity numbers and all the other red-tape of Apartheid. If an African does not pay his poll tax, he is easily found.

And for those who, according to the Commissioner, 'flee' from work following injuries, SACTU queried whether it was not strange that they 'kept fleeing' from certain companies more so than others.

The mention of the poll tax was not accidental, as this too had increased in 1960 to a minimum of £2 per year for each African male over the age of eighteen. No such tax applied to any other section of the population. This was but one of 160 compulsory and 681 voluntary levies imposed upon the African majority under Apartheid. These revenues, subtracted from already below-subsistence wages, financed the bureaucratic machinery that administered and controlled the movement of Africans from the cradle to the grave.

Unemployment: The Scourge of Capitalism

Unemployment is the disease of capitalism, it is one of the crimes for which the workers get punished.

It is a well-established fact that capitalism cannot sustain conditions of full employment for its workforce. Insofar as production is geared towards the creation of profits and the accumulation of capital, rather than production for use to satisfy real human needs, it is in the interests of the ruling class to always have a 'reserve army' of unemployed labour that serves to depress the value of wages paid to those productively employed. When the wage demands of organized labour reach unacceptable levels, the capitalist class is then able to replace that labour with a portion of the reserve army. In other words, the crisis of unemployment is a structural feature of capitalist society and, as such, has little to do with the capabilities or inclinations of individual workers.

In South Africa, under the migrant, cheap labour system of Apartheid, it is no surprise that Africans suffer the most severe repercussions from unemployment - especially in periods of capitalist recession. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, this problem became particularly acute in the major industrial centres. Normal functioning of capitalist priorities, plus the Nationalists' policy of removing, unproductive' African labour from urban centres, resulted in tremendous suffering for Black and especially African working class families.

Accurate and comprehensive data on the number of unemployed workers of all races is virtually impossible to find. The fact that even White unemployed workers, the most protected and privileged under Apartheid, were driven by circumstances to form a Johannesburg Council of Unemployed Workers in 1961 gives some indication of the seriousness of the situation. For Coloured and Indian workers, the problem was much worse. In Durban, an estimated 40 per cent of the entire workforce was out of work in 1962. Within the large Indian community, approximately 50 per cent, or 40 to 50 thousand workers, were jobless and destitute. Starvation was reported in the working class districts of Happy Valley, Clairwood and Sea Cow Lake. Suicide rates increased as many considered death the more attractive alternative.

For Africans, the most exploited, the government used the unemployment crisis as a means of endorsing out thousands to the rural areas and reserves. Even in the rural areas, Africans had to 'compete' with convicts amassed for slave labour on the farms. The Bantu Affairs Department (BAD) made no attempt to establish statistics on the number of Africans unemployed during this period, although SACTU and other bodies made a conservative estimate of 100,000 Africans out of work. On one occasion in late 1961, the Johannesburg office of the BAD admitted that there were at least 25,000 permanently unemployed in that area alone, and no new work-seeker permits were being issued. An African who lost his/her job in the urban area had only fourteen days in which to locate alternative employment before being removed to the reserves and left there to starve.

As in all capitalist countries, a system of unemployment insurance designed to appease working class militancy exists in South Africa. The Unemployment Insurance Act of 1937, re-enacted in amended form in 1946, provided for a UI Fund to which certain classes of workers falling within defined wage limits were obliged to contribute. The employers and the state also 'contributed' to this Fund, investing the millions of pounds in profits and monies previously stolen from the workers themselves. The 1946 amendments included urban African workers as contributors as part of the SmutsGovernment's 'reforms' following the Mine Workers Strike. Important exclusions, however, were African mine and farm labourers, whose slave-driving bosses objected to such welfare-oriented schemes as obstacles to the efficient exploitation of cheap labour. Also excluded were domestic servants, public servants, casual workers and certain categories of seasonal labour.

When the Nationalists came to power in 1948, they excluded virtually 90 per cent of African workers from eligibility under the UI Act by restricting benefits to those making more than £ 182 per year. In 1957, this was changed again to exclude all Africans making less than £5 3s. 3d. per week. Furthermore, African workers eligible under these conditions were obliged to take any job available, and failure to do so resulted in a forfeiture of benefits. Nationalist changes in the legislation from 1948 onwards meant that African workers who had paid into the Fund in previous years were robbed of an estimated £9 million in contributions and denied all benefits.

The UI Fund grew in size to an estimated R 140 million (£70 million) by 1962, but the exclusion of the majority of unemployed from benefits meant that the Fund did little to alleviate suffering. In fact, the Minister of Labour used a portion of the workers 'money to subsidize companies forced to lay off staff in 1959. Three years later, the Minister made a tour of Europe as part of the government's scheme to promote White immigration to South Africa. Rather than allowing Black workers to assume skilled positions, the racist regime went out of its way to ensure that the 'civilized labour' policy was maintained while the African masses starved.

Against these intolerable conditions, SACTU Local Committees throughout the country took the initiative to organize the unemployed. As Stephen Dlamini recalls, it was 'SACTU's role to explain the capitalist system to the people so that individual workers did not become depressed but rather collectively organized to fulfil the working class role of changing society'. Not surprisingly, the momentum for the SACTU campaign came from Durban, where Indian workers were starving and Africans were 'sleeping in water drains'. Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg and Cape Town followed the Durban lead by organising mass meetings of the unemployed throughout the early 1960s.

In April 1959, the Durban LC enrolled 150 members into an Unemployed Workers Union (UWU), and from this base called on the other four Congresses to get involved in a 'Jobs for All' campaign. SACTU Head Office and LCs demanded: that the U1 Fund be used to increase the size and length of UI benefits., an end to White immigration and equal opportunity for all workers to take on skilled jobs; amendments to the UI Act to cover all workers; and a national minimum wage of £1-a-Day which, if granted, would make a large proportion of African workers eligible for benefits under the Act.

In September 1961, as conditions worsened in Natal, a SACTU delegation from Durban decided to present these and other demands in the form of a memorandum to the Minister of Labour in Pretoria. The Minister agreed to meet the delegation and five SACTU activists left by car for the 400-mile trip to the Transvaal. In Pietermaritzburg, they were intercepted by the Special Branch and told that the meeting had been cancelled, but they proceeded in any case. Stopping in Johannesburg, the delegation went to SACTU offices where the SB again harassed and interrogated everyone present. The following day, upon arriving at Compensation House in Pretoria, they were met by armed police and told that the delegation must turn back. The group, which consisted of Stephen Dlamini, Mate Mfusi and three Indian trade unionists, resisted this intimidation and eventually talked officials into at least accepting the memorandum. Upon their return to Durban, Diamini and others were arrested. It was later reported that the Minister cancelled the meeting because Africans were part of the delegation; that is, he would discuss unemployment only with regard to those workers covered by the IC Act. For the African workers, Workers Unity described the alternatives: '. . . a whole population is either forced to starve or sell its labour on the slave market'.

The Wits LC followed the example set by Durban. Numerous rallies were held on the Johannesburg City Hall steps, and an Action Committee of Unemployed Workers was formed. Initial signs of cooperation with the White workers' Council of Unemployed Workers disappeared quickly as the latter were intimidated by the authorities into severing all relations with SACTU. The Council did, however, call for an end to Job Reservation, White immigration, and a national minimum wage of £1-a-Day as well as equal coverage for African workers under the Ul Act. In Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, more rallies were held. Alven Bennie recalls that in PE sympathetic liberal organizations tried to organize a soup kitchen, but the Local Committee rejected this approach because 'our approach was to seize power and we could not achieve that by becoming a charity organization'.

As with Workmen's Compensation, SACTU was left with few options except to lobby wherever possible for changes in the UI Act. In September 1962, Head Office sent a memorandum to the Minister of Labour requesting representation on the UI Board. Listing its numerous objections to provisions in the Act, SACTU argued that other coordinating bodies represented on the Board could not speak for - and did not care about - the interests of African workers. These other bodies either had few African trade unions affiliated (as was the case with TUCSA) or, more commonly, they refused Africans affiliation. Only SACTU, representing 40,000 African workers, could speak for the most exploited section of the working class. For precisely this reason, the Minister of Labour refused to even acknowledge receipt of the memorandum. To the Nationalist government and the capitalist class, unemployed Africans do not constitute a human dilemma worthy of attention; they are only a force to be disciplined and controlled and cast out of sight to the barren reserves.

Housing and Rent Arrears

The fantastic situation then arises where the (Johannesburg) City Council as an employer pays its employees starvation wages and then jails and fines those employees for not being able to pay the rents which the Council itself has fixed.

After starvation wages and unemployment, the third side of this triangle of exploitation and suffering was the housing and rents crisis. Under the Native (Urban Areas) Act, Africans in urban areas were required to live in designated, racially segregated areas - hostels, villages or townships. Only African domestics who stood at the beck and call of their White oppressors in the suburbs were exempt from these restrictions. Using cheap African labour in the construction trade, 'model' townships sprang up on the perimeters of the industrial centres in the 1950s.

Associated with the forced removals to 'African areas' was a significant increase in the total cost of subsistence living: rents payable to local authorities sky-rocketed and transport costs to travel the average 10-12 miles to work now became a matter of daily necessity. Only wages failed to increase. For the many workers averaging around £8 per month income, payment for transport, rent and food purchased at work would normally cost £7 10s. leaving only 10s. (shillings) for the month to cover all other expenditures. In essence, the 'slum clearance' programme meant greater suffering and starvation in only slightly better accommodation.

Until the end of 1954, the state housing policy focused on what was termed 'sub-economic' units. Residents of these units who earned less than £15 per month had average rents of £2 5s. or about 15 per cent of total monthly income. From 1955 onwards, the government policy shifted to the 'economic' housing scheme, whereby tenants earning £15 per month paid a rent equivalent to 20 per cent of their income; the Johannesburg City Council raised the income level to £20 as the base rate for 'economic' rentals. These flat percentage rates became a tremendous burden on African families living on poverty wages, a burden that for most could not be met.

The assessed rentals bore no relationship to the tenants' ability to pay. SAIRRconcluded that a minimum monthly subsistence budget, excluding rent, for the Johannesburg African family in 1958-59 was as follows:

If, for example, a tenant made £ 16 per month, the 20 per cent reduction for rent (£3 2s. would leave only £ 12 18s. for all other expenses. As the SAIRR study excludes rental payments from the budget, this means that the minimal shortfall between income and expenditure would be around £9 per month. Thus, payment of 'economic' and 'sub-economic' rents was a virtual impossibility for the vast majority of African tenant families.

The inferior quality of these tiny, rapidly -constructed township houses added to the difficulties of African workers. Inadequately heated during the winter months, and unbearably hot in the summer, the majority of the homes had no electricity, no running water, no inside toilet facilities, no ceilings, no room partitions and only earthen floors. Harry Loots, a SACTU leader in the Transvaal FCWU who had worked as a surveyor for the City Council during the construction of the Soweto township, recalls that the houses were 'just four walls with no internal divisions and no concern for the comfort of the occupants. Living conditions were appalling. In Kwa Mashu, the African township built 14 miles from Durban in the late 1950s, houses were within a short period of time in bad repair, roads and drainage systems were poor, lighting was inadequate and recreational areas were nonexistent. The same conditions obtained in Merebank, an area where poor Indian families resided. These realities led SACTU to warn the government in 1962 that it was 'sitting on a time bomb which will explode if this situation continues'. Indeed, the 'time bomb' exploded into violence on many occasions throughout the 1960s and 1970s, particularly during the Durban strikes of 1973-74 and the Soweto uprisings of 1976.

Returning to the rent issue, thousands of African tenants throughout the country had no alternative but to default on these exorbitant rents. In Kwa Mashu, for example, over £45,000 in rent arrears was owed by Africans (over 80 per cent of the township population), and 53 per cent of Indian families in Merebank were behind in their payments. Instead of adjusting rents to reasonable levels based on the ability to pay, the local authorities resorted to the brutal practice of invoking Section 38 (3) (p) of the Native Urban Areas Act, which allowed for criminal prosecution of rent defaulters.

The Johannesburg City Council became the most notorious local administration to make criminals out of poverty-stricken African tenants. In early morning raids, police would enter the townships and after a sufficient number of defaulters were rounded up, they would be put in jail, held there for 1 to 2 days and then taken before the local Magistrate's Court for trial. Sentences ranged from 5s. for an admission of guilt to £2 or two weeks in jail. For the thousands who were forced to choose jail, jobs were lost making rent arrears even higher, workers were re-imprisoned, families evicted and personal possessions sold by the City Council to cover the cost of rents owed. The families would then, in most cases, be 'endorsed out' of the urban areas, either to starve in the reserves or become slave labour on the farms.

Many of those prosecuted by the City Council were among township residents who refused to pay rent increases when the transition to economic' rents was made; over 2,000 also refused to fill out Council questionnaires regarding family incomes. The Council then merely assumed incomes of £20 per month, charged 'economic' rents and prosecuted with abandon all defaulters. Most nonsensical of all was the practice of making defaulters pay fines that did not apply towards the rent arrears, thus having the effect of increasing indebtedness. Or, on other occasions, defaulters would be given a six-month period in which to pay, and if payments were late or missed, the tenant would be put in jail for six months for contempt of court. Also, persons found innocent in rent arrears cases were still forced to pay the cost of the summons. As a Workers Unity article put it in 196 1, 'for city councils to persist in this attitude is sheer economic exploitation'.

Although the Johannesburg City Council defended its victimization in narrow legalistic and economic terms, the fact was that low wages paid to its 20,000 Council workers created the very poverty that made rents impossible to pay. Approximately 10,000 of these workers received less than £13 per month, and 87 per cent received less than enough to meet the SAIRR minimum subsistence budget. In some jobs, City employees were paid only 50 per cent the average wage given by private employers. With this high basic rental rate, plus court fines for arrears, many tenants were spending up to one-third of their incomes on rent-related costs. For the Council, however, prosecution was lucrative as an estimated £38,000 came from rent arrear payments not credited against the original unpaid rents. If one considers that in at least one month in every year, the mandatory lump-sum deduction of £2 for the African poll tax is taken out of wages by employers, it is no surprise that almost all township residents would be in rent arrears at one time or another. Understandably, parasitic money-lenders lost no opportunity in further exploiting African workers as they waited outside the factory gates. As Phyllis Altman, SACTU Assistant General Secretary, concluded in 1962:

The African workers live in a nightmare of debt, fines and imprisonment. They walk a tight-rope where one unanticipated event (such as the death of a parent in a rural area, involving travelling or funeral expenses) throws their budget out and they are immediately in arrears with their rent.

In response to these deplorable situations in Johannesburg, the Wits LC and SACTU Head Office took the initiative on behalf of township residents. A high profile publicity campaign exposing the Council's practices, coupled with mass meetings and demonstrations and the formation of Residents' Associations forced the City Council to curb the most excessive examples of victimisation and criminal prosecution. For example, the Council was forced to stop sending tenants 'final warnings' where no previous warnings had been issued; often the 'final warnings' reached the tenants after the date designated for payment and subsequent eviction.

The SACTU campaign operated at two levels. The most difficult but also most successful part entailed intervention on behalf of individual tenants. An estimated 90 per cent of rent defaulters earned between 0-4 per week. Desperate for assistance, these persons would be lined up at the SACTU office each morning, waiting to speak to Phyllis Altman and others about their respective situations. In almost every case where either SACTU or Residents' Associations challenged the Council, the summons against the individual was either withdrawn or satisfactory alternative arrangements made. In fact, Altman discovered later that the Council files of individuals assisted by SACTU were marked 'Don't arrest' or 'Don't jail'.

At a more general level, SACTU and other supportive groups campaigned for an end to criminal prosecutions, a reduction in rents and rents based on the type of accommodation rather than as a percentage of income. All of these demands were related to the demand for a general increase in the wages of African workers. A SACTU delegation met with the Johannesburg City Council, pointing out the crucial relationship between low wages and rent arrears. Other specific objections were made - for example, SACTU called for an end to the 'lodger's fee', whereby the Municipality could charge for children sixteen years or over living at home with their parents. The 1962 SACTU Annual Conference added new demands, which included the waiving of all arrears, a lowering of house rentals to 75 cents per room and a 50 per cent reduction in public transport costs.

Mounting pressure initiated by SACTU on the City Council led it in 1962 to agree to end criminal prosecutions, but only with the added counter-threat of increased evictions. The Council also proposed that employers automatically deduct 25 per cent of the wages for those workers in rent arrears, but SACTU and others vehemently objected to a scheme, which would maintain high rents and in effect make the capitalist bosses 'rent collectors' for the City. As SACTU said in a press release:

The scheme will ensure that the City Council gets its rent and then the Africans will be free to starve on the rest of their salaries. There would of course be no problem with rent collections if the Africans were paid a living wage.

Yet the City Council resisted wage increases and voiced the old argument that increased 'efficiency, production and supervision of the African workforce' must precede wage hikes.

Other Local Committees in Durban, Kimberley, the Cape Western Province and Port Elizabeth took up the campaign in their respective areas. In Cape Town, the major focus was on the forced removal of Africans from the Western Cape; in Port Elizabeth, the LC presented a memorandum to the City Council opposing rent increases and high unemployment. Although Councils pretended to make special allowances for 'hardship' cases, unemployment was consistently rejected as the basis for 'hardship' exemptions. In Durban, the LC monitored the Kwa Mashu situation closely, as Kwa Mashu had been the new township where most Africans were forced to live after the violence in Cato Manorin 1959 (see Chapter 9). The high incidence of kwashiorkor, a malnutrition disease resulting from poverty, was linked to the low wage-high rent issue by SACTU activitists in Durban.

In conclusion, SACTU leaders considered the housing-rents campaign as one of the most effective ever waged. As with the £1-a-Day campaign, the demand for lower rents and better housing emerged from the objective needs of the people. Both were clearly the consequences of class exploitation under Apartheid. It must also be kept in mind that these non-wage campaigns discussed in this chapter were conducted most enthusiastically during the early 1960s when state repression reached its peak. Even in the final moments of above-ground activity, SACTU never failed to base its campaigns and goals on the needs and aspirations of the South African working class.