Early white mine labourers, displaced from the land soon after the South African War, lashing and tramming underground. Note the absence of protective head- and footgear or torches. It was only when the craft union, the Transvaal Miners’ Asso - ciation, opened its membership in 1907 to unskilled white workers (replacing the cri terion of skill with race) that working conditions underground began to improve. In 1911 four out of every 1 000 miners were killed in accidents in the gold mines. After the miners’ strike in 1913, employers introduced an accident monitoring scheme and the death rate dropped to two and a half per 1 000. In the 1980s, an average of 600 mineworkers died every year on the gold mines.
For whites who entered the mines without skills there were hardships. They mostly settled in the poorer, multiracial pockets of the underclass. Afrikaners from the countryside could not find work easily as they did not have industrial skills or the language of the economy, English. Nevertheless the more resourceful turned their rural skills into saleable commodities – brick makers identified clay soil in Newtown, others transported agricultural produce to feed the townspeople. In later years, as Afrikaners recovered politically and gained ascendancy after the 1924 general elections, many found employment in the police force and on the railways. Administrative and corporate work was mainly assigned to the English-speaking.
It was to white miners that the skilled work was assigned. Artisans – engineers, plumbers, carpenters, builders, drillers and supervisors – mostly English-speaking immigrants, held the top jobs, demanding what mine owner Sir George Albu complained were ‘exorbitant rates’. ‘Why not make the native the real miner?’ he asked, ‘and thus save much of the money paid to white men for work they never perform?’
In 1907 skilled miners downed tools when the mining companies required them, in a cost-cutting exercise, to increase their tasks from supervising two black drillers to supervising three – work that had once been accepted as skilled work but was now defined as unskilled, and given to workers who earned one tenth of the wage of the skilled white worker. The skilled miners lost that strike. Supervisors did not require much training, and mine managers were quick to turn to Boer refugees from the devastation and land loss of the South African War of 1899–1902.
Although the Afrikaners did not have industrial skills, they had experience of supervising black labour tenants or sharecroppers. They were recruited to break the strike. The outcome was that the artisans pragmatically recruited these new supervisors into their unions, forming the first industrial union (as opposed to the craft unions that had existed before). They chose to combine as a racially defined category of workers to protect their rights against the super-exploited black migrant workers.
With the additional weapon of the vote, they voted into Parliament several Labour Party seats and in 1911 the Mines and Works Act set aside 32 certificated jobs such as engine drivers, carpenters, blasters and other skilled positions for whites, excluding not only blacks but also coloureds, who had formerly been allowed some concessions in the pecking order.
The background to this long period of crude capital accumulation was the racism that pervaded South African white society – from the new industrialists and the ruling class, to the increasing number of traders, clerks and administrators, right down to the artisans and semi-skilled white workers and those supervising black workers underground.
White workers felt their jobs were threatened by the low wages of black workers. They suffered from what Frederick Johnstone termed ‘structural insecurity’ – those without adequate skills faced the possibility that they could be fired and replaced by experienced, lowly paid black workers. It was this fear that propelled the new industrial unions to push for job reservation and regulations that allowed for training and apprenticeship for whites only.
