Occupational Segregation — The Enduring Legacy of Job Reservation in South Africa

“A people desiring to emancipate itself must understand the process of its enslavement.” — W.P. van Schoor

Job reservation entailed the reservation of work for persons of a specified race or for persons belonging to a specified class. The consequences of job reservations for black and coloured people were that black and coloured people, including highly skillful and semi-skilled people: a) were forced into the “cheap labour” category; b) were only allowed to undertake “unskilled labour”; and c) could only earn low wages. This system was, for the first time, endorsed by legislation in 1926 — but only for the mining industry. The Mines and Works Amendment Act provided that certificates for competency required to perform skilled work on mines could not be issued to black and coloured people. The Industrial Conciliation Act of 1956 officially endorsed work reservation to be applied in the entire industry in full force. It was also provided that employers who gave work to a person, where the work was not reserved for a person of that race, were guilty of an offense. Job Reservation operated together with the ideology of Baaskap the term literally translates from Afrikaans to English as “boss-ship”, but a more applicable transliteration is “domination”, which is reflective of the idea that “the white man must always be boss”.

The 18th report by the Employment Equity Commissioner points to workplaces in South Africa still being racially divided and pay differentials still being skewed in favor of Whites. The truth is the socio­economic and ideological structures which underpin the colour­ bar system in South Africa are there for a reason. In 1924 the virulently racist government introduced the Civilised Labour Policy. The object of the policy was to eliminate the Bantu people out of all the industries, skilled and unskilled, by a gradual process and to substitute the labour of the “poor whites”.

Since coming into power in 1994 the ANC has not had a coherent or muscular policy response to the effects of the so called. “ Civilised Labour Policy “ which was adopted by successive segregationist governments and perfected under apartheid with the sole aim of of repressing the blacks in industry and uplifting indigent whites at the expense of the State. “Civilised labour” was defined as “labour … rendered by persons, whose standard of living conforms to the standard … tolerable from the usual European standpoint …”. “Uncivilised labour” was defined as labour performed by labourers who “enjoyed a standard of living restricted to the bare requirement of the necessities of life as understood among underdeveloped people …”. In terms of the civilised labour policy state departments not only received an instruction to give preference to civilised labour but the Board of Trade and Industries was empowered to withhold import rebates from firms that employed too few white workers in terms of the Customs Tariff and Excise Duties Amendment Act 36 of 1925.

The strongest demand for labour came from the gold mines of South Africa. With the creation of the Union of South Africa there was for the first time a state strong enough to ensure the effective implementation of the laws and labour policies that had developed in Kimberley and on the Witwatersrand to control the workforce. The development of South Africa as the most powerful and industrialized country in modern Africa was built upon the labour of a poorly paid, mistreated, and disenfranchised workforce drawn from the entire subcontinent.

Once these migrant labour got to South Africa they were subjected to a system of pass laws. Which was in effect Europeans limiting Africans right to work terms of these laws Natives needed consent, evidenced by a pass, to be present at a certain place (at a certain time) — which might of course have included the workplace — or to work at a certain place (at a certain time).

The cheapening of black labour through migrancy rendered skilled white workers vulnerable to attempts by mine owners to reduce costs by substituting cheaper semiskilled black labour for expensive overseas workers. Whites demanded a “colour bar” to protect their access to certain jobs. Initially formulated to reconcile white workers to Milner’s decision to import Chinese labour, the colour bar was formally established in South Africa under the Mines and Works Act of 1911 and its amendment in 1926.

From the Botha­-Smuts Government of 1910 to the outbreak of the First World War laws that dealt with mine labour, the migratory labour system were passed. In 1911 the Mines and Works Act was passed which, amended in 1925, shut the Non­-European out of skilled occupations; it applied not only to mines and works, but to railways, roads and buildings. The Chamber of Mines had by this time a sufficient control of a vast supply of African labour. In the mines these Africans did skilled work for unskilled rates of pay. In the mines, particularly, this Act operated as a law to exclude the African from skilled pay rather than to shut him out from skilled work. African wages on the mines had remained practically stationary since the opening of the gold mines. At the same time the skill and productivity of the African miners have grown by leaps and bounds. Technical improvements increased the efficiency of production. Up to 1890, with the mercury process of recovering gold, 60 per cent. had been extracted. After 1890 the cyanide process recovered 90 per cent. The greater productivity of African labour ­ and the intensification of his exploitation made it possible for the Chamber of Mines to bribe off the white labour aristocracy without materially affecting its profits.

This trend continued after 1911. In 1914 an African miner could unearth 250 tons in six months. After the introduction of the light jack­hammer drill his output rose to 800 tons in six months by 1930. The super­exploitation of the African miner was increased by the very technical development which should lighten labour in any Civilised country. Improved technique, more intense sweating of labour, and a freezing of African wages permanently, made the white labour policy possible. “The great majority of wage earners in South African industry,” said J.H. Hofmeyr, “are Native or Asiatic or Coloured. They are the proletariat upon whose shoulders are borne the South African white aristocracy of labour.” However, even the greatest technical development and the harshest exploitation of African labour had not sufficed to support the uneconomic burden of this white aristocracy of labour. The Chamber of Mines itself more and more felt the pressure of this burden and had been able to relieve only through artificial measures such as devaluation, at the expense of other sections of the exploited classes.

The 1911 Mines and Works Act created a major economic problem for the rulers of this country, viz., the burden of an expensively paid but comparatively unproductive white labour aristocracy. This system of privileged white labour was later to extend to secondary Industry as well.

The second major legislation was the Labour Regulation Act of 1911. Having tied down the African miner as an “unskilled” worker, the Botha­-Smuts Government set out to continue building up the labour recruiting network which Rhodes had established. The African, who had previously been rendered landless, was now prevented from becoming a settled worker in the town. The effect of this Act was to keep the African in a constant state of movement between the reserves and the mine compounds. The migratory labour system received the stamp of law. It served a threefold purpose. In the first place, it prevented the settling down of a propertied peasantry. Secondly, it prevented the settling down of a permanent urban working class. Thirdly, the migratory labour system was bound up with the system of low wages.

In any other country an industry paying high wages would attract a great supply of labour. With the mining industry in South Africa it is the opposite was true. As far as the African was concerned, since an increase in wages would enable him to stay in the reserves for a longer time. In order to preserve a steady supply of labour and to prolong his stay in the mines low wages are paid. “The increase of native wages would . . . tend’ to some extent to a decrease rather than an increase in the supply of native labour and this consideration has undoubtedly helped to keep wages down.” The migratory labour system is essential for the policy of cheap labour. If the migratory labour system had broken down it would have polarised into a landed peasantry in the rural areas and an organised working­ class in urban areas, thereby sounding the death­ knell of the cheap labour system whose foundation is the landless worker.

Despite their increasing productivity In the Mines Black men were paid 61 pounds per annum as compared to white men who earned 278 pounds per annum. This wage remained stationary for Black men for over 60 years. The Indistrial conciliation Act of 1924 (aka Job Reservations Act) expressly excluded black employees from the definition of an employee. Only white and coloured workers were permitted to form and join registered trade unions. To further its control over industrial relations the government passed the Wage Act in 1925. This Wage Act provided for the unilateral determination of wages and working conditions where there was no agreement under the Industrial Conciliation Act. Unlike the Industrial Conciliation Act, the Wage Act applied to black workers as well. Under this act Europeans who were “deemed to be employees” received increases. Despite generating great wealth for the mines, mine owners paid black workers much less than a living wage, and in real terms, migrant workers on the gold mines earned 20 per cent less in 1960, and 8 per cent less in 1972, than they did in 1911. In the mines white people earned 11 times more than black people did in 1935 and 20 times more in 1970.

To meet the needs of Afrikaners in the cities, South Africa from 1924 promoted manufacturing through a number of techniques: the levying of tariffs, the use of the gold tax to subsidize infrastructure development, the provision of inexpensive food to manufacturing workers, and the imposition of stringent controls to ensure low wages for black labourers. However, the insulation of South Africa’s fledgling industries from international competition during the worldwide depression and World War II may have been the most important factor in its economic expansion.

In 1923 the National Party (NP) and Labour Party (LP) formed a pact to win the general elections held in the Union of South Africa in 1924. They concluded an electoral pact, denouncing the government for promoting ‘big financial’ interests and jeopardizing the future of South Africans ‘as a civilised people ’, and promising social and economic policies that included old-age pensions. The economy had been in recession for three years, and reports that one half of all white school-leavers were unable to find jobs precipitated a sharp panic around unemployment in 1924. In the 1924 election campaign, Hertzog emphasized the threat to South Africa remaining ‘a white man’s country’. The NP’s Tielman Roos told voters in Johannesburg that ‘the native is not an asset to the white man in this country; he is a curse’. African workers, he said, should be prohibited from doing any semi-skilled or skilled work. For both Pact parties, the forthcoming elections were about the survival of the ‘civilized races’ and protecting ‘civilized labour’. ‘Civilized labour’ was (in Hancock’s words) ‘a powerful incantation’, its ‘magic’ uniting the Pact parties whilst exposing disagreements.

For the Labour Party, this was part of the ideology of the imperial working class, an ideology shared by workers in Australia and elsewhere. White workers were urged to vote against the South African Party government because ‘it is the tradition of the people of every British Dominion to insist that their country shall be the home of an ever-increasing civilised and contented people ’, and ‘ because South Africa shall be no exception and shall not be permitted to degenerate into a big, cheap-labour compound, in which the people will find it harder to earn a civilised livelihood’. Much more systematic racial segregation and discriminatory policies were needed to ensure ‘civilized’ lifestyles for white and coloured people.

The Pact parties made a strong appeal to coloured voters, who were still a significant electoral force in the Cape Province (and also comprised a significant proportion of the membership of predominantly white trade unions in the Cape). Hertzog himself declared that coloured people should be treated on an equal basis with the ‘European’ in employment and education, and even that he favoured extending the vote to coloured people in the Transvaal and Free State (which Afrikaner republicans had opposed successfully at the formation of the Union). Coloured people, Hertzog said, would help maintain the white man’s position against the ‘native’. The term ‘civilized labour’ (as opposed to ‘white labour’), probably borrowed from Australian trade unions, may have been used first by the Labour Party in the 1924 campaign specifically so as to appeal to coloured workers. The appeal may have enjoyed some success, with a strong swing to the NP in several Cape constituencies where there were high concentrations of coloured voters.

In 1924, Prime Minster Hertzog defined the concept of “civilised labour” as follows:

“The Prime Minister desires it to be understood by all Departments of State that it has been decided as a matter of definite policy that, wherever practicable, civilized labour should be substituted in all employment by the Government for that which may be classified as uncivilized. Civilized labour is to be considered as the labour rendered by persons, whose standard of living conforms to the standard of living generally recognized as tolerable from the usual European standpoint. Uncivilized labour is to be regarded as the labour rendered by persons whose aim is restricted to the bare requirements of the necessities of life as understood among barbarous and undeveloped peoples.”

The new Pact government moved swiftly to protect the position of white labour by enacting the Wage Act. Section 8 of this Act provided for uniform minimum wages for both black and white in order to protect white labour against undercutting from cheaper black labour. Increased numbers of white poor moved to the towns to take advantage of the employment opportunities created by the Amendment Act to the 1911 Mines and Works Act). The act established a colour bar, which reserved a broad range of mining jobs, classified as skilled or semi-skilled, exclusively for Europeans.

The Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924 was amended in 1930. The Amendment Act set the minimum wage rates and maximum working hours for “persons excluded from the definition of ‘employee’”. The wage Act of 1937 provided for a single national board (the Wage Board) to recommend minimum wages. The Industrial conciliation Act 36 of 1937. together with the Wage Act. of the same year “applied the rule of equal pay for equal work” at all levels

No wage-fixing agency was allowed to discriminate on grounds of race or colour. This amounted GROSS. discrimination. For it prevented Africans and Coloureds from undercutting, this was the ONLY way by which they could offset prejudice. and lack of skill.

The Act aimed to raise the wages of semi-skilled white workers to a civilised level. The government recognised that there was a need to fix a minimum for Black workers in order to protect the White workers wages against undercutting. So the term “equal pay for work of equal value” entered the South African lexicon in 1937 to GROSSLY discriminate against Blacks.

During the 1930’s, “poor white fright” continued as a crises within the Afrikaner community with 17% of the white population estimated to be poor whites — correlating to an estimated 25% of Afrikaners. By the end of the decade, notwithstanding political influence, Afrikaners were still in a dismal position within the labour market — with a high concentration of Afrikaners working as unskilled labour and only a small number attaining professional occupations. In 1937, the South African Iron and Steel Industrial Corporation (“ISCOR”) (a state-financed corporation) had to revise its “civilised labour” policy to sustain profitability. The policy had resulted in increased labour costs, which lead to a surge in prices and consequently negatively affected ISCOR’s international competitiveness. Although ISCOR dismissed 875 white workers in semi-skilled positions and replaced them with lower- wage earning black workers, the “white-black labour ratio remained high compared with private industry”.

In 1946, 60 000 black mineworkers went on strike to demand an increase in the minimum wage. The strike ended with demoralising results — twelve strikers dead; more than a thousand injured; trade union offices raided and numerous unionists arrested; and a subsequent three-year delay in wage increase. During the same year of the mineworkers’ strike, Henry Fagan was appointed by Jan Smuts to head a commission to investigate and report on black urbanisation, including the pass laws and migrant labour. The Fagan Report was published in the year of the 1948 election. The commission concluded that a “policy that accepted that whites and blacks had to co-exist” was the only practical option. By then, “poor white” unemployment had largely been eliminated. White labour was now firmly entrenched in a superior position relative to black labour within the labour hierarchy. The Fagan Report’s recommendations were not compatible with the NP’s agenda and after the 1948 election, the report fell by the wayside.

It’s. often said those who don’t know history are bound to repeat it and our legislators are asleep at the wheel

In South Africa today Africans have the highest rate of unemployment, earn comparatively less than whites and are over represented in the lower rungs of the organization. The high level of racial stratification of occupations after apartheid does not show any signs desegregation. Occupations remain highly segmented by race, with blacks disproportionally holding low-paying jobs.

In 2012 democratically elected government re-introduced to South Africa The apartheid era term ‘equal pay for work of equal value’ which has since 1937 been used to ensure Africans don’t get paid equally for doing the same or similar work.

In South Africa of The Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998. section 6(4) provides for equal pay for work of equal value. The amendments were made in terms of the Employment Equity Amendment Act 47 of 2013. The act came into effect on 1 August 2014 by presidential proclamation. Section 6(4) of the EEA prohibits unfair discrimination in terms and conditions of employment between employees. This section covers employees performing the same or substantially the same work or work of equal value. Comparable worth is shorthand for “equal pay for work of equal value” or “equal pay for work of comparable worth.”

The doctrine of “comparable worth” attempts to remedy the inequities of pay which result from a long history of colour bar pay practices. The ideology of baaskap meant that White males always had to be paid more regardless of experience and/or qualification. The right to equality in employment in South Africa is a relatively new phenomenon. We come from a long history of systematic segregation and suppression of blacks in South Africa, over time, a two-tiered labour force was created with a severe disparity in skills; where white workers were earmarked for supervisory and management positions and black workers largely performed low skilled work. Despite more than two decades of government policy aimed at rebalancing South African society and the economy, steep inequality arguably remains one of the biggest threats to political stability. Inequality has been weaved into the fabric of South African society through centuries of discriminatory practices, government policy, and legislation. What the new pattern should be and what elements are required to accomplish an acceptable redistribution are not easily discernible. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to discern.

The ANC needs to use its state power and legislative power to rebalance the scales. The first step would be to ensure they write legislation that ensures substantive justice for Africans rather than formal justice for all. Almost none of the labour laws were written to expressly exclude Africans. That’s why innocuous terms like equal pay for work of equal value could be used to discriminate.

Less than a third of segregation and about half of racial stratification in occupational distribution are related to blacks’ characteristics, especially their lower educational achievement, a gap that has been reduced over time. Segregation and stratification, however, remain when blacks and whites with similar characteristics are compared. The ANC cannot hope to reverse this injustice by passing laws that have no teeth and no punitive sanctions for organizations that refuse to comply.

The ANC needs to rethink its “lean social democracy” as public policy. This system where rights cultivated but the responsibility of the state to provide a universal system of social security support is abrogated is not the right model for South Africa. It cannot be that 24 years after democracy we sit with a situation where The Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment is the centerpiece of the Government’s economic strategy for transforming economic inequality in South Africa.

The truth is, the economic anxiety faced by Africans is about more than just income or wealth levels or differentials. The anxiety stems from a large percentage of the population Africans and Colourds being excluded from a rigged economic system that disproportionately benefits the beneficiaries of apartheid. Policies that advance inclusive growth are not going to automatically include the excluded especially in communities where multi generational unemployment is a reality.

The ANC has to be single minded and ruthless in ensuring that the economically marginalized get to be active participants. It’s unfortunate that theANC is still applying economic policy that assumes that the financial markets themselves are supporting business, and thus, economic growth. This has not been the case since 1994. The financial industry has, according to a large body of data, grown too large and too far removed from its original mission of investing in new, productive ventures. Financialization is on steroids in South Africa.

The growth in size and scope of finance and financial activity in our economy, the rise of debt-fueled speculation over productive lending, to the ascendancy of shareholder value as the sole model for corporate governance (and the short term pressure that puts on companies), to the enormous political power of the financial lobby. In reality only around 15% of the money flowing from financial institutions actually makes its way into business investment. The rest gets moved around a closed financial loop, via the buying and selling of existing assets. We cannot transform anything in an environment where capital rules the roost.

It’s time for a serious policy rethink. Our survival as a country depends on it.