TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 2

Subsection 9

Workers

98 The argument put forward by sections of the business community, that they were not (directly) involved in gross human rights violations, was challenged by the trade unions and others. In this respect, the distinction made by Professor Mahmood Mamdani between “perpetrators and victims” on the one hand and “beneficiaries and victims” on the other, deserves careful attention.¹⁹

99 The BMF accused white business of violating human rights in specific ways. White business supported and did not oppose the location of black residential areas at “absurdly” long distances from work. “Business chose to provide hostels that kept men and women away from their families.” In addition, white business relied “quite heavily” on the police to structure relationships with black workers, be it around strikes or repatriations. Managers served as police reservists and business co-operated with security agents in providing data on and monitoring workers. “Business continued to pay taxes quietly and rejected calls of civil disobedience.”

100 Personnel policies, the BMF added, promoted “separate development” in job positions, wages, medical attention and pension pay-outs. Black people were denied the opportunity to practise their customs and were not, for example, allowed leave for funerals or to visit traditional healers. “This conflict between business practice and black custom caused a lot of anxiety and emotional damage.” In this respect, the BMF noted that business still uses, for example, culturally-biased psychometric tests to assess job applicants. “Blacks are made to feel unintelligent, and it further deprives them of their right to development.”

101 COSATU gave what it called “incontestable” examples of the everyday suffering imposed on workers. These included:

a sexual harassment in the workplace;

b the implementation of pass laws “through the active policing and collaboration of management as a means of labour control and cheapening labour”;

c preventable industrial accidents and diseases, where workers were maimed or killed “because not enough money was spent on safety and health”;

d starvation wages, which “translate into preventable malnutrition, disease and death, or lack of access to medical care”;

e denial of essential welfare and social services;

f creation of unemployment to protect profits;

g victimisation, including the assault and imprisonment of trade unionists and strikers.

102 COSATU noted that, despite the legal duty of employers to provide employees with healthy and safe working conditions, many “failed to take the necessary steps to protect employees from occupational accidents and diseases”.

More than 60 000 workers lost their lives in occupational accidents between 1964 and 1994… The carnage can be expressed in other ways. In 1974, for example, it was estimated that 100 000 hands, 50 000 feet and 40 000 eyes were badly injured; 31 000 men and women were permanently maimed; several hundred were injured severely enough not to be able to return to work, and 2 284 were killed.

103 COSATU identified five main devices used by business: the ‘colour bar’ (unequal wages, benefits and conditions of employment); segregationist labour legislation; unequal provision of education and training; and labour market regulations, such as the pass laws. Each of these was developed in the COSATU submission.

104 COSATU also noted that the business community never opposed the government’s clampdown on the union council. Instead, ‘total strategy’ “elaborated the ideological basis for overt collaboration between senior military officers and business leaders”. This co-operation grew out of more than their converging strategic conceptions of necessary ‘reform’. It had a direct economic base.

105 Business representatives disagreed. Ms Ann Bernstein, who heads the Centre for Development and Enterprise, argued (in her personal capacity) that business “is not the place to protect human rights”. Rather, the Constitution, the government and ultimately elections are the mechanisms that ensure human rights. The South African Chamber of Business (SACOB) noted, however, that such issues had been discussed by the white business sector: “there are records of meetings at which a persistent case was made against the violation of human rights and the deleterious impact of apartheid laws.”

106 As mentioned earlier, Old Mutual did not believe it contributed to gross violations of human rights as a result of its employment practices, “except possibly in some very indirect way by fulfilling its obligations to government by complying with the laws, paying taxes and investing in government stock.”

107 By contrast, the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) accepted that, in supporting apartheid through providing development loans to homelands and by advising officials on policy, “the Bank was an integral part of the system and part and parcel of the apartheid gross violation of human rights”.

108 The Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) Archives Committee stated that, in the areas of wages, job discrimination, security and union recognition, international firms “were little different from their South African counterparts ... Investors in the system automatically develop a vested interest ... Subsidiaries were involved in disputes with non-racial unions in which they did not hesitate to invoke the law and call in the police.”

109 Professor Sampie Terreblanche suggested that racially-based capitalism was deliberately designed to produce white beneficiaries and black victims. He argued that:

A very high rate of economic growth was maintained in the 1950s and 1960s. During its heyday of state and racial capitalism, the racial disparity ratio between white and African incomes became much larger. While the per capita income of whites was 10,6 times higher than African per capita income in 1946/47, white income was fifteen times higher than in 1975. If ever there was a period of upward redistribution of income (mainly from Africans to Afrikaners), then it was the period of high growth in the 1950s and 1960s. Given the power structures of white supremacy and racial capitalism, it was a period of high growth with a ‘trickle-up’ effect.²⁰

110 Professor Francis Wilson points out that, although South Africa’s average gross national product “places it in the upper middle-income range of countries in the World Bank’s annual tables, the depth of inequality is so great that there is wide spread and acute poverty which afflicts some 40 per cent of all South Africans”.²¹

111 Statistics provided by Whiteford and McGrath²² illustrate the effects of apartheid on income. From 1975 to 1991, the average growth rate declined, as did the per capita income of all population groups (except Asians) in the poorer sections of the population. The income of the poorer 60 per cent of both Africans and whites dropped by more than 35 per cent.

112 These deteriorating circumstances resulted in initiatives by business and government²³ aimed at enhancing capital accumulation and improving the lot of workers. This led to raised expectations in the African community – which could not be met in the declining economic situation.