TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 2

Subsection 1

13 As far as the business community was concerned, its purpose in participating in the Commission was to promote understanding of the role of business under apartheid and to explore areas where businesses failed to press for change – both at a political and at an organisational level. Failure to act quickly or adequately on the political front was regarded as an error of omission. Failure to adjust employment practices was likewise regarded as regrettable, but not amounting to a gross human rights violation.

14 Tongaat-Hulett expresses it thus:

On occasions, there may have been isolated incidents of ‘ill treatment’ of employees by individual managers, as was unfortunately true of many institutions and business in South Africa over the past forty years. In certain cases, too, management may have been guilty of ‘turning a blind eye’, for example, to treatment meted out by supervisors to lower-graded (mainly black) workers. This may have been done under the implicit assumption of most whites during the times that the level of human rights that might be enjoyed by different groups was racially differentiated. Combined with possible implicit class prejudice, this may have resulted in certain forms of ill treatment of workers (for example through separate facilities, job reservation and so forth) - not gross violations of human rights as defined by the Commission - but ill treatment all the same.

15 In contrast, the BMF regards precisely such forms of ill treatment as human rights violations:

The human rights violations by business are seen as those policies, practices and conventions which denied black people the full utilisation of their potential, resulting in deprivation, poverty and poor quality of life, and which attacked and threatened to injure their self-respect, dignity and well-being. Certain of these violations were open abuses, whilst some were indirect; yet others buttressed those carried out at a socio-political level.

16 In brief, the white business perspective sees apartheid as a set of politically inspired, economically irrational policies that were imposed on (and undermined) the economy. Those critical of business during the period under review by the Commission, on the other hand, emphasise the inherent link between apartheid and capitalism – refusing to allow for any sharp analytical distinction between the economic and political spheres. As the ANC puts it:

Apartheid was more than a programme of one political party. It was a system of racial minority rule that was both rooted in and sustained by white minority socioeconomic privilege at the expense of the historically oppressed black majority. Apartheid was associated with a highly unequal distribution of income, wealth and opportunity that largely corresponded to the racial structure of society.

It is our contention that the historically privileged business community as a whole must accept and acknowledge that its current position in the economy, its wealth, power and access to high income and status positions are the product, in part at least, of discrimination and oppression directed against the black majority. While some of the important business organisations and groups opposed some of the laws introduced by successive apartheid governments, a number of core discriminatory laws were both actively sought and tolerated by business.

Historically privileged business as a whole must, therefore, accept a degree of co-responsibility for its role in sustaining the apartheid system of discrimination and oppression over many years.

17 The COSATU submission went further:

We remain of the view that apartheid, with its form of institutionalised racism, masked its real content and substance – the perpetuation of a super-exploitative cheap labour system. We all know that the primary victims of this system were the black working class and the primary beneficiaries the white ruling elite.

18 The SACP draws out the implications of this for the business argument:

The idea that the private sector’s chief sin ... was that it failed to `speak out against a system that was against economic logic’ is spurious. Capitalism in South Africa was built and sustained precisely on the basis of the systematic racial oppression of the majority of our people.

In presenting the apartheid political economy as an integrated and coherent system of racial capitalism, the struggle against capitalist oppression is twinned with that for democratisation. Resisting the growth of black trade unionism, and calling in the police during strikes, is thus seen as evidence of collaboration with the apartheid system against democratisation.