Early battles of
workers
Yours for the Union Baruch Hirson Zed Press, £32.95 hardback, £9.95 paperback
Reviewed by Charlie
Van Gelderen. This book by Baruch Hirson could easily have been titled The Making of the South African Working Class as it is a panoramic and well-researched survey of the growth of the black working class in South Africa in the period 1930-47.
These were the years which saw the rapid industrialisation of South Africa and its inevitable consequences - a huge increase in the working class and the uncontrolled urbanisation which resulted in the sprawl of vast shanty towns all around the big industrial centres.
The book is particularly valuable because it emphasises the organic link between the struggles in the mine and factory with the parallel conflicts in the urban ghettoes and rural reserves. The unity of the struggle in South Africa and the surrounding territories is emphasised.
The indigenous black work force was supplemented by workers drawn from what are now Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland, and from the now independent countries north of the Limpopo - Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi.
Hirson concentrates his study on the Transvaal and particularly the Witwatersrand, the centre of black trade unions during the period, marking the significance of the gold mines in the economy. While white trade unions flourished and enjoyed legal protection, black workers who wanted to organise were faced with enormous difficulties.
Their organisations were not illegal as such, but they had no legal status either. After 1937
REVIEWS
South Africa's black
they were permitted to give evidence before the newly established Wages Boards, but strike action was forbidden:
*The most elementary matters presented new problems: Africans had no right to occupy premises in the town and subterfuge was needed to rent offices, without which it could not survive. Financing the union was even more daunting, Wages were so low that subscriptions were not always forthcoming and the unions were starved of funds.."
Black miners, domestic and rural workers - two-thirds of the workforce - faced even greater difficulties. They were excluded from the provisions of the wage legislation, and this prevented trade unionists from gaining meaningful improvements for them. This did not stop would-be organisers. There were still campaigns to organise fam labourers as carly a 1920 (today, they still remain largely unorganised) and several attempts to organise domestic servants. Most important were the attempts to organise the mineworkers in the 1930s and 1940s.
In 1928, unions led by the South African Communist Party (SACP) combined in the nonEuropean Federation of Trade Unions, and affiliated to the Red International of Labour Unions (the Profinter). This was the time of Stalin's "Third Term" ultra-leftism. In line with Profinter directive, the "revolutionary" unions rejected all reformism and "paid little heed to the workers' immediate needs."
In the 1930s, it was Trotskyists, expelled from the CPSA who took the lead in unionising the black workers of the Rand. Thibedi and later, Murray Puryd and Ralph Lee, members of the Workers Party of South Africa, took over the leadership of the African Laundry Workers Union, but the membership had grown to only 300 when Lee and other Trotskyists decided there was little they could do in South Africa and set sail for England where they were later to form the Workers International League(WIL)
By far the most important Trotskyist trade union organiser at that time was Max Gordon. Hirson mistakenly describes him as a member of the Workers Party. At the time he left Cape Town for Johannesburg in 1935, he was a member of the Lenin Club. Max was a member of the first Trotskyist organisation in South Africa, the Marxist Educational League.
Gordon made skilful use of such legal routes as did exist. He transformed the union's offices into a meeting place for the unemployed - a place where employers could contact the union when extra staff was required. He arranged for legal assistance, set up classes in literacy, arithmetic, history etc. The classes were eventually closed by the police because, they said, the history course had a distinctly political flavour.
Some idea of the scope of Max Gordon's activities can be gauged from W.G. Ballinger to the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR): "Mr Max Gordon, whose activities are being subsidised from the grant given me by the Institute of Race Relations, reports that he attended to about 150 complaints of Native workers against employers of labour during the period May to August 1937 covering claims for wrongful dismissal, wages in lieu of notice, underpayment of wages, accord-
BARUCH HIRSON
YOURS
UNION
Chas and Creamy Serager in Somal Arca ing to agreement and payment for overtime. (Sums of) El to €50 were obtained totalling approximately E260.*
Gordon continued his activities until he was interned by the Smuts govemment in June 1940.
I have concentrated in this review on the activities of the small Trotskyist groups, because this is a period in South African working class history which is not generally known. Hirson's book of course, covers a vastly wider field. It is a rich and wellresourced mine of information about the struggles of the black workers of South Africa fighting employers and the state for the very right to organise, combining the class struggle in mine and factory with the national struggle.
The book ends in 1947. The gains which had been won during the war when the economy was heavily dependent on the black workers, were not substantial enough to guarantee the future advance of black trade unionism. When the white workers returned from the war, there were displacements, a situation made worse by the downtum in the economy.
After 1948, of course, they were to face the further repres sion of Verwoerdian apartheid. It was not to be until 1972 that the black trade union movement took the giant stride forward which was to lead to the situation today when the organised working class in COSATU and Nactu are pivotal in the struggle for a socialist South Africa.