Labor Reforms

Pretoria's modest proposals

South Africa last week announced a set of proposals for improving the rights of at least some of the country's 7.5 million black workers. Among the provisions: permitting most black workers to join officially recognized labor unions; encouraging employers to pay black and white employees the same wages; integrating company cafeterias and washrooms; doing away with the practice of reserving certain categories of jobs for whites only.

The proposals, which must be debated in the all-white South African Parliament but are almost certain to become public policy, are the product of a government-appointed commission on labor reform headed by Nicholas Wiehahn, a labor law expert who once worked on the railways as an apprentice stoker--a job that has always been reserved for whites. The government hopes the proposals will be seen as evidence that South Africa is pushing its labor practices more into line with those being urged on foreign companies there by the Common Market and by the U.S.'s Rev. Leon Sullivan, the General Motors director who has drawn up a list of fair labor practices that many American firms in South Africa have agreed to follow. To judge by the angry reaction of several of South Africa's white labor leaders, the Wiehahn proposals must seem fairly far reaching. Wessel Bornman, chief secretary of the all-white 38,000-member Iron, Steel and Allied Industries Union, denounced them as "a slap in the face of every white worker in the country and the biggest embarrassment to white unions in the history of South Africa."

Well, not really, for the proposals amounted to a good deal less than met the eye. In the first place, the right of membership in labor unions will not apply to the country's 2 million "nonresident" black workers, a group that includes not only those from neighboring countries but also those whose legal residence is in the country's artificially created "tribal homelands." Moreover, no all-white unions will be required to take in black members, and no employers will be obliged to pay blacks and whites equally or to integrate company faculties if they do not care to do so. The wishes of the employers, said Minister of Labor Stephanus P. Botha, "will have to be respected."

As for the practice of reserving certain jobs for whites, this had been breaking down significantly anyway during an era in which unemployment among whites was virtually nonexistent and approached 20% among blacks in urban areas. Employers have long made a practice of hiring Africans for jobs theoretically reserved for whites because no white applicants were available; the job in question would simply be listed as "painter's assistant" rather than painter, or "woodworker" instead of carpenter.

But the new provisions are still important. As Dr. Nthato Motlana, a community leader in the African township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg, puts it, "The principle underlying the proposals is commendable. But there has been no suggestion that discrimination in industry should be outlawed." Without that, he added, "all the fine intentions will mean nothing." In effect, just about the only thing that will change is that employers who continue to pay their black employees less than whites for the same work, and who stick to the other traditions of apartheid, will no longer be able to justify their policies by saying that they were merely following the letter of the law.

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