Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 44 No. 9. May 4 1981
Background of Repression
Background of Repression
Historically, the state and management have been hostile to any organisation of African workers. Trade union leaders have been banned and imprisoned, strikes have been broken up by police, and union officials are constant targets of management victimisation.
African workers live in poverty-stricken "bantustans" or in tightly controlled urban townships where they are frequently harassed by police in search of Pass Law offenders. When factories need them, they are recruited and paid low wages. And the Pretoria government sees the economic demands made by African workers as a threat to South Africa's economy, which is based on the maintenance of a cheap and controlled labour force which forms a pillar of the apartheid system.
African trade unionism is inherently political and could prove to be a key factor in the prolonged attack on the racist system that still hangs on tenaciously in South Africa.