South African Labor and International Support

Abstract

In the early 1960s when the South African Government outlawed the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), the South African trade union movement was an almost unnoticed casualty. The South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), affiliated with the ANC in the Congress Alliance since 1955, had become the leading trade union movement based on non-racial principles in direct competition with the racialist Trade Union Congress of South Africa (TUCSA). Although not completely outlawed, SACTU's leadership was driven into exile or underground and a decade after its founding SACTU was moribund and union organizing within the country was at a virtual standstill (Luckhardt and Wall, 1980; Feit, 1975). During the late 1960s and early 1970s, what little international support was generated for the South African working class was funneled through the exiled SACTU organization and its ANC ally. This was a small but important part of the general campaign against Apartheid South Africa, which like the campaign against apartheid sport, sought the total isolation of the regime and all apartheid institutions. As with the sports movement, statements of support by international bodies and the exclusion of internal Soulh African bodies from international forums was the key to the SACTU/ANC policy on South African labor (Luckhardt and Wall, 1980: 470-91). In the early 1970s, a spontaneous revival of trade union activity within South Africa challenged the racialist principles of TUCSA and the authority of the South African state. The independent black trade union movement which dates from the Durban strikes of 1973 represented a new phenomenon among South African workers (Macshane et al., 1984).