AT the head of the march of 2 000 workers was a man holding aloft a red flag. This was Durban fifty years ago on 9 January and the flag was simply a warning to traffic. It had no deliberate revolutionary symbolism; nor did the marchers have approval from the underground South African Communist Party. But in a broader sense it was truly revolutionary, one of those watershed moments that foretold the demise of apartheid. This was the beginning of the Durban Moment, although there had been earlier strikes at the docks.
The workers were from Coronation Brick and Tile, part of a wave of small-scale, sporadic and illegal stoppages that in the view of labour historian Steven Friedman changed South African factories forever. John Aitchison, banned and restricted, but co-editor in Pietermaritzburg with John Morrison of the Student Wages Commission newspaper Isisebenzi, describes the Durban Moment as ‘a pivotal fulcrum around which the most significant changes in South Africa occurred. It was far more important than the ANC’s activities in exile.’
African workers were not legally permitted to strike or picket. But they reported to the factory gate and refused to clock in, creating a work stoppage highly visible to the public. At Coronation the minimum wage was R9, the much-publicised poverty datum line R18, and the demand R20‒30 per week. Two days later the workers settled for R11.50 after the intervention of Paramount Chief Goodwill Zwelithini.
It was a relatively modest victory, but it had ignited a spark that would affect textile factories in the Frame Group, a notoriously poor employer. Starting at Frametex in New Germany on 25 January, a R20 per week demand soon spread to all factories in the group, involving 6 000 workers. Then in early February, 16 000 Durban municipal workers, African and Indian, were out demanding R13. By the end of March, 61 000 African workers had withheld their labour, almost three times the national total for the seven years to 1971. One hundred and fifty firms were affected, 26 in the textile sector and 22 in the metal industry.
At the very height of apartheid, this required courage and perception from factory workers, but the police maintained a low profile and publicly thanked them for their restraint. They intervened only twice, baton charging and tear gassing marches; and ignored many illegalities, although their heavy presence, including reinforcements from Pretoria, was intimidatory. This was in strong contrast to police brutality towards university students in Cape Town the year before. Opinion polls showed a significant majority of whites shocked by low wages and supportive of the stoppages. The press, including some Afrikaans titles and even the SABC, reflected these sentiments and was particularly critical of the Frame Group.
Only factory management seemed out of tune, claiming they had no inkling of a problem that must have been simmering for years. A textile worker complained that he could not afford the blankets he made and wages in the textile sector were 20% lower than the average factory rate, yet only 10% of the workers were unskilled. Weavers’ pay had risen 90 cents over six years. Those on piece rates were hampered by stoppages caused by inferior yarn and some women workers took home as little as R3.50 per week. Even limited rights such as notice pay were flouted. Locked in a paternalist mind-set and contemptuous of collective worker action, manufacturers inevitably blamed communists and outside agitators whose presence not even the police special branch could detect. The extent of worker exploitation was confirmed by the fact that the modest wage increases awarded had no apparent effect on profits. A Natal Witness leader spoke of company ‘avarice’.
Why Durban? This is a question that has never been fully answered, although there are a number of partial explanations. There is no evidence that wages (R13 average) were significantly lower than elsewhere. But the previous year’s short-lived stevedores’ strike had hit the docks. Industry in Durban was very concentrated, particularly in textile manufacturing; there was a high degree of Zulu consciousness and ethnic solidarity among workers supported by a resurgent Inkatha; and most strikers lived in adjacent townships belonging to the KwaZulu homeland. The work of the University of Natal-based student wages commission had publicised poor wage levels. More significantly, some of those involved were recruited by Harriet Bolton of the registered Textile Workers Industrial Union, which supported the strikers.
From a worker perspective, the material gains were limited, but the psychological boost was considerable. Workers had shown that shopfloor solidarity, including co-operation across the African-Indian race line, at a time when industry was short of labour and job reservation was crumbling could translate into power. The stoppages were largely spontaneous and apparently leaderless, so management and the Department of Labour could not find targets to intimidate. One worker with 35 years’ service earning R9 a week sought theological inspiration: ‘This thing comes from God’. Ambitious demands, although not met, were salutary and showed worker awareness that their wages were in real decline measured against inflation. A parliamentary investigation in London subsequently produced a critical and influential report on wages and conditions offered by British firms operating in South Africa.
These were protests designed to challenge structural poverty. Industrial action by African workers was not new, but it had previously been subordinated to broader community or political aims. The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) was a mass movement between the wars; Communist union leaders had parallel agendas and ulterior motives; and the South African Congress of Trade Unions became a recruiting ground for MK. These 1973 stoppages came straight from the shopfloor and were anti-vanguardist. Termed workerist, they reflected grassroots democracy and power and subscribed to non-racialism; a new consciousness in which as David Hemson put it, hope operated as a revolutionary force.
Important tactical lessons were learnt, from which the unions never looked back although there would be major setbacks. The government immediately amended the legislation with the Black Labour Relations Regulations Act replacing the Masters and Servants Act. Both the Department of Labour and industrialists focused on communication, not worker rights. Liaison committees were added to works committees and in very limited cases these allowed worker input to wage negotiations at industrial council level.
Perhaps the most important outcome of three months of industrial action was a new-found pragmatism in which workers sought any opportunity in the system to promote their cause that did not betray their basic principles. It was in this spirit that worker benefit societies, which had developed out of wages commission work, emerged as independent unions. The Federation of South African Trade Unions was established in 1979.
It was the Durban Moment indeed, but it had echoes in Pietermaritzburg. John Morrison recalled that the wages commission on the Pietermaritzburg campus was highly successful and its General Workers Factory Benefit Fund operated in a number of local factories, such as Scottish Cables, Sarmcol and Alcan. Jeannette Cunningham Brown was banned as a result and the commission’s car, funded by Peter Brown and Mamie Corrigall, was stolen and vandalised, probably by the police. But the city’s work stoppages were short-lived and limited to Alex Carriers and Goodhope Pipes, plus Ferralloys at Cato Ridge. At Sarmcol in Howick workers forced a R1 increase upping the minimum wage to R12. And the municipality pre-empted a stoppage by raising its minimum likewise. In 1974, the first independent union, the Metal and Allied Workers Union (MAWU, now NUMSA), was established at the Lay Ecumenical Centre, near Pietermaritzburg.
Academic Eddie Webster pointed out that labour on the mines and in the factories constituted apartheid’s Achilles Heel. Three years after the Durban Moment, the Soweto Uprising provided another watershed event.
* First published in The Witness, 6 January 2023.