1946+mineworkers+Strike,+COSATU

COSATU Press Release, 11 August 2006
=1946 mineworkers strike=

Saturday 12 August 2006 is the 60th Anniversary of one of South Africa’s epic class struggles - the Witwatersrand Mining Strike of 1946. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) joins the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in commemorating this historic turning point in the emergence of the South African trade union movement.

Although not the first large-scale strike by African mineworkers to rock the industry - there had been one in 1920 involving similar numbers - it was at the time the biggest to be organised under a union banner, and with union recognition as one of its core demands. The strike changed many things, not least of which was the way the liberation struggle would be conducted.

When shifts were due to start that Monday, 12 August 1946, hundreds of members of NUM’s predecessor, the Black Mineworkers’ Union (AMWU), at mines across the Reef, downed tools in support of a demand for a wage increase of 60 shillings and an end to single sex hostels.

While the strike started off fairly small and localised, it grew rapidly, eventually involving some 70,000 miners. On Tuesday, 13 August, the Council of Non-European Trade Unions' leadership called for a general strike in support of the AMWU. This failed to materialise as police mounted watches over train stations and bus terminuses.

Despite the exhortings of communists, such as SP Bunting, who had connections with white workers, calls to white workers to rally to the defence of African mineworkers went unheeded.

Over the course of the ensuing week, the strike was crushed. Strikers and volunteers staffing the AMWU office were arrested and the office ransacked by police. Underground sit-ins were broken up and workers were driven back to their compounds at bayonet point.

On some mines, strikers were driven back to work underground. Marches were violently broken up on the East and West Rand. The strike was brutally crushed. Twelve workers were killed and 1,200 injured.

COSATU echoes the comment by NUM President Senzeni Zokwana that “It is important to recall the contributions made by these black mineworkers, their resilience and resistance under difficult times. In particular we remember the names of J.B. Marks, J.J. Majoro, and Thabo Mofutsanyane as courageous trade union leaders who made a stand on behalf of black mineworkers.

“The fact that the NUM is here today is due to the early efforts of these leaders and workers in organising mineworkers,” Zokwana said.

However it is not only the NUM, but the entire trade union movement, that owes a huge debt to these heroes of 1946. Their courage and self-sacrifice laid the foundations on which COSATU was built 40 years later.

The commemorations will culminate in a march on Saturday, 12 August, on the offices of the Chamber of Mines in Johannesburg. [details to be added]

To mark the 50th anniversary in 1996, the Shopsteward magazine published a short history of the Popular history of the strike. Below are some extracts:


 * The war years and the origins of the AMWU**

Prior to, and during the early stages of World War II, gold-mining capitalism organised in the Transvaal Chamber of Mines exercised a stranglehold over the economy. Virtually every aspect of government social and economic policy - the pass laws, job reservation, taxation - was geared to ensuring a stable supply of cheap labour and profits for the mining industry.

But, as the war progressed, secondary manufacturing industry experienced a relative boom, based on a form of import-substitution. The period was effectively a war economy. As white workers - unskilled, semi-skilled, skilled, and supervisory - were drafted as soldiers into the war effort, a few black workers made their way into positions in sections of industry to replace them. On the mines, a few African workers even entered low-level supervisory positions, resulting in the formation of the Native Mine Clerks' Association. African unionisation grew.

In 1941, communists within the ANC - led by JB Marks - pushed for the establishment of the AMWU. The decision to sponsor the formation of the AMWU, as A Distant Clap of Thunder, the SACP's 1986 commemorative publication asserts, marked for the ANC "...a decisive turn away from its traditional sources of support - the educated elite and professional classes - towards a new constituency in the black working class..." In the same year, CNETU was formed, with Gana Makabeni and Dan Tloome at its helm.

By 1944, AMWU claimed 25,000 members. A year later, CNETU claimed 158,000 members in 119 affiliate unions. Throughout the war years, strikes were not uncommon, as unionised and non-unionised African workers seized the opportunity to push for improvements in living standards. Even the introduction of War Measure 145 by the Smuts government prohibiting strikes failed to deter them.

But white soldiers returning from war duty demanded to be placed back in their former jobs and to be shielded from the creeping competition to employment opportunities from black workers, notwithstanding the existence of the Colour Bar Act. Indeed, War Measures introduced in 1940/1 guaranteed civilians drafted into the armed forces their jobs upon demobilisation. Some 250,000 men and women were seeking re-absorption at the end of the war.

During the war, black workers made comparatively dramatic advances in wages, mainly as a result of a paternal Labour Minister, Wadeley, and the desire of the Union government to keep war production on track. During this period, CNETU actively sought to discourage strikes and mounted no serious campaigns amongst its affiliates.

On the contrary, it cosied up to Wadeley, even inviting him to address its founding conference.

Conditions and living standards on the Reef's gold mines, however, did not mirror the modest achievements of organised African workers elsewhere in the economy. The Transvaal Chamber of Mines steadfastly refused to recognise AMWU, and continued to peg wages at the absolute minimum cost of the reproduction of African mine labour. The mining bosses of the time argued that the incomes of African miners were supplemented by subsistence production on the reserves, ignoring the wastelands that these had become.

The 1943 Lansdown Commission investigation into the conditions of African miners recommended a small increase in wages, but refused to recommend to the Chamber recognition of the AMWU.

In April 1946, at the AMWU's annual conference, the more than 2,000 delegates made the following demands:


 * An increase in the minimum wage from 2.5 shillings to 10 shillings per day;
 * Two weeks paid leave every year;
 * 100 bonus after 15 years service;
 * The right to hold meetings at the mines without a permit;
 * family housing.

The immediate cause of the 1946 strike was the poor quality of food rations served to mineworkers in the compounds. But African miners had been increasingly frustrated over the war years in their quest for recognition of their union, for decent wages, for an end to the compound system, and an end to the systematic brutalisation of their world of work. Persistent representations and deputations to the Minister of Labour and the Chamber by the AMWU had met with no success.


 * The strike's aftermath**

The consequences of the suppression and failure of the strike were devastating. The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) which had enjoyed a measure of institutional toleration during the war years, saw much of its leadership - including the party's entire Johannesburg District committee - hauled up on sedition charges in the aftermath of the strike. This was followed by a systematic series of measures to destroy the CPSA, culminating in the Suppression of Communism Act in 1950.

White soldiers who had returned from the war at the end of the previous year to find many of their jobs filled by Africans, ditched Smuts and the United Party, and voted Malan's National Party into power in 1948 on promises of, inter alia, tighter regulation of African movement and access to skilled and semi-skilled employment. What was to become apartheid, was on the march.

The AMWU and its parent body, CNETU, until then the leading non-racial federation with an explicitly political opposition to the state (in contrast to the South African Trades and Labour Council), began to disintegrate, and eventually folded. Effective African mineworkers' organisation was stymied for more than three decades, and they did not respond again in such numbers to calls for strike action for more than forty years. Mining capital had succeeded in subduing African labour's resistance, and the stage was set for its domination of South Africa's political and economic development for the next period.


 * A failed strike?**

Many historians have held that the strike was probably mistimed. Had it happened during the war years, they argue, there is every chance that it would fundamentally have altered the course of African unionisation and worker rights, and indeed of South African history. There appeared to be reluctance on the part of unions and the ANC to confront the mining industry at a time when it was most vulnerable, an opportunity that would not come again for several decades.

Part of the reason for this lies in the reluctance of the CPSA, and the communists within the CNETU leadership, to disrupt the war effort after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. For the Second International, the struggle against fascism became its rallying platform in the war years. The ANC in turn believed that supporting Britain and the Allies would pay off in the struggle against racial domination.

It was also a time in which some sections of the working class - the newly proletarianised - began to experience for the first time the relative benefits of waged labour, and were reluctant to jeopardise this. This is partly reflected in the cultural milieu - the music, the dress, and the fascination with things American, which persisted into the late fifties.

The African petty bourgeoisie which led the ANC and formed a section of trade union leadership was also beginning to make some headway in its social and economic ambitions. These factors help explain CNETU's failure to seize the moment that the war represented. Had the strike occurred during the war years, it could have resulted in profoundly different outcomes for what was to become our liberation struggle.

But there is another reason which helps explain why the strike did not happen earlier. This has to do with the national, tribal, and cultural origins of the miners themselves, as well as that these were men forced by poverty to seek a living far from home. Their status as rural people made them wary of venturing beyond the mine compounds to seek interaction with their urban class counterparts. Most of the strikers were not South Africans. The miners came from Portuguese West Africa (Angola), Mozambique, Tanganyika (Tanzania), Nyasaland (Malawi), Rhodesia and the British Protectorates of Bechuanaland (Botswana), Basotholand (Lesotho), and Swaziland.

Finally, for the Smuts government and the Transvaal Chamber of Mines, there was too much at stake. They knew that conceding to demands for recognition of a union for African mineworkers would spell the beginning of an assault on the power they had hitherto exercised, unchallenged. Despite the esteem in which Smuts was held abroad - benign, paternal, a humanist, one of the founding fathers of the United Nations - he had no hesitation in siding with the mining employers and using his armed forces to crush the strike.


 * Patrick Craven (National Spokesperson)**
 * Congress of South African Trade Unions**
 * 1-5 Leyds Cnr Biccard Streets**
 * Braamfontein, 2017**


 * P.O.Box 1019**
 * Johannesburg, 2000**
 * SOUTH AFRICA**


 * Tel: +27 11 339-4911/24**
 * Fax: +27 11 339-5080/6940/ 086 603 9667**
 * Cell: 0828217456**
 * E-Mail: patrick@cosatu.org.za**

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