Although the Smuts government was badly shaken by the 1922 strike, it decided against extending the colour bar on the mines. It saw improved training for whites as a better option. Minister of Mines and Industry F.S. Malan explained to Parliament in 1923 that he did not wish to extend the colour bar. ‘It is degrading to the white man to say that [he] should be artificially protected against the native and coloured man . . . The reason why a number [of white miners] are in danger today is that so many are not efficient miners.’ The white workers had not availed themselves of the opportunities at the mining schools to become trained workers. They went into the mines as learners, Malan said, ‘and learners they remained’.
While Smuts was prepared to accommodate white labour, he felt that they must not ‘tyrannise everything’. A legal colour bar was an admission by whites that they could not compete against blacks, and had to take recourse to laws that violated human rights and fairness. He did not contemplate giving blacks the vote, but he also believed that ‘no statutory barrier should be placed on the native who wishes to raise himself in the scale of civilisation’. It was necessary to see that ‘no injustice [was] done to any other section of the community’.
The Smuts government nevertheless embarked on a major shift in the system of industrial bargaining that legalised a superior bargaining position for white workers. Under the old system, unions were barely tolerated and destructive strikes erupted over the colour bar. The Industrial Conciliation Act passed by the Smuts government in 1924 provided for reaching legally binding agreements in industrial councils consisting of employer associations and white or largely white trade unions. Employers could not lock out striking workers and workers could not strike before the council had tried to resolve a conflict. But unionised workers had to sacrifice the lightning strike, their major weapon. On the other hand the industrial conciliation machinery favoured white and coloured workers by excluding ‘pass bearers’ (meaning blacks) from trade union membership, giving white-led unions a commanding role in determining occupational structures, and access to training and wages.
Before the 1924 election, the National Party (NP) and the Labour Party agreed to form a Pact to support each other’s candidates against South African Party (SAP) candidates. Of the 135 seats, the NP won 63 and Labour 18 against the SAP’s 53. Hertzog formed an NP-Labour government. The SAP had suffered a stunning defeat, (See The SAP defeat).
The Hertzog government that came to power after the momentous election of 1924 added a weapon that the state could use against employers who wished to undercut white labour – the Wage Act of 1925. It empowered the responsible minister ‘to set the same minimum wages for whites and blacks’. The assumption was that if black and white wages were set at the same level employers would prefer whites. The government and its successors used these weapons sparingly. The priority was to enable the economy, particularly the mining industry, to grow and to provide jobs. Various trade-offs were made between the government and the mining industry. It was not expected that the latter would help solve the poor-white problem by employing them, or even to pay white miners particularly well. (White miners’ wages only began rising towards the end of the 1930s, but those of black miners did not increase in real terms before the early 1970s.)
But the government would not tolerate unilateral decisions by the industry to reduce its white labour force sharply. An amendment to the Mines and Works Act was added to protect white mineworkers from displacement. In 1932 the Chamber of Mines told a commission that the mines could manage with ‘a materially smaller number’ of whites, but such a policy was no longer an option. White miners rose in number from 22 099 in 1922 to about 28 000 in 1930.
