Hammer and Sickle
A Distant Clap of Thunder Book issued to mark the Fortieth Anniversary of the 1946 Mine Strike <http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=4727> A Salute by the South African Communist Party to South Africa's Black Mine Workers Published by the South African Communist Party, 1986 Part 3 The Union Emerges In the face of these formidable obstacles, the ANC pressed ahead. On the 3rd August, 1941, 81 elected delegates of organisations met in Johannesburg; they came mainly from trade unions, Communist Party branches, and social and political organisations on the Witwatersrand. There were few miners present, and the few there were mainly surface workers and clerks - the men with longer experience of urban and industrial life who were outside the compound and repatriation procedures which applied rigorously to underground workers. Some of these had been members of incipient trade unions which had been started - often still-born - in earlier years; some were members of the small African Mine Clerks Association, which still survived. The Conference set up a working committee to bring the union to a reality. The Committee included James Majoro, a leading member of the Mine Clerks Association; TW Thibedi, a founder and survivor of a 1936 attempt to build a union and the first black member of the Communist Party, JB Marks, a veteran member of both the ANC and the Communist Party, and Gaur Radebe. The Union grew slowly, painfully slowly. It needed to break through the barbed-wire curtain that cut the miners off from the world outside; it could do so only by means of painstaking contact with individuals and small groups of miners during their off-duty hours in the recreational areas around the compounds. Meetings of more than a handful could only be held secretly. Organisers were harried and harassed by the private mining company police, who ran the mining properties with an ubiquitous authority without defined limits, almost like an army in occupation of foreign territory. Union contacts themselves, when identified or suspected, were victimised by having their contracts terminated and being deported back to the territories from whence they came. Secrecy and word of mouth were the main organising techniques. And yet the union grew. But slowly. By 1944 it could count its members in thousands, perhaps as much as four thousand - yet little enough in a sea of over 340,000. But a beginning. It was war time. Social and economic conditions in the country were getting worse; everywhere there were steeply rising prices of goods in the shops, and growing shortages of commodities - especially some foodstuffs; the appetite of the enormous Allied armies had first call on the supplies. Companies increased the pressure on their workers, intensifying the rate of exploitation, reducing rations, and allowing standards of services, recreation and welfare to fall. In the industrial world outside the closed encampment of the mines, workers' struggles against falling standards and rising costs had forced some government action. From 1943 automatic 'cost of living allowances' had become standard for all industrial workers, compensating them in part for rising shop prices. But agricultural workers and black miners had been excluded from the legislation, on the specious grounds that their cost of living was met by employers who provided their accommodation and rations. On the same specious reasoning, the Chamber of Mines refused to pay any such allowances even to those mine clerks who were not contracted labour. The bitterness of feeling among the clerks became a source of support and strength for the Union. The Union tried repeatedly to meet the Chamber of Mines to discuss its members' grievances. But the Chamber, characteristically, had taken a policy decision to ignore the Union's very existence. Letters from the Union went deliberately unanswered; attempts at intervention by go-betweens, such as the then existing Native Representatives in Parliament and the Senate, were given a brusque brush-off. When the Union turned to government for intervention, the response was much the same; which was the Master's Voice and which the servant is not clear. Union demands for a Wage Board investigation into the industry - pressed on the government in Parliament - were just as summarily turned down, although the Wage Board had been set up by statute specifically for the purpose of making such investigations in industry, and of recommending minimum standards of wages and conditions. From: http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?ID=2626 -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. 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