Looking back on SEIFSA’ s first four decades, its former President, Graham Boustred, was happy to beat the drum. SEIFSA, he said, had led the country in forward-looking industrial relations:“ We were the first major industry to eliminate completely the concept of race from our agreements and the SEIFSA minimum wage has been a target of achievement for many other industries.”
SEIFSA’ s founder members expected that it would make progress in dealings with the trade unions. It had lived up to these expectations.
SEIFSA had provided a stable environment in which the industry would experience“ phenomenal growth”. Thanks to a Main Agreement on employment conditions that was“ a remarkable instrument”, the time lost to the industry through work stoppages had been minimal.
The Federation had steered its industry to significant black advancement. The wage gap between unskilled and skilled workers had been narrowed from a ratio of 5:1 in 1961 to 2,8:1 in the early Eighties.
In the second half of the decade, pressures on the Nationalists intensified, within and outside the country. Demonstrations and riots continued to wreck the townships. Troops moved into areas where rampaging youths were burning schools as well as shops seen as supporting the system.
The government sought to appease an increasingly hostile world by pulling down long-standing pillars of social apartheid.“ Mixed marriages” and sex across the colour line were no longer banned. Public amenities were opened to all and influx controls – the hated pass laws – were abolished. A tricameral Parliament was established, with separate Houses for Whites, Indians and Coloureds.
State President PW Botha declared that these reforms showed that South Africa had“ crossed the Rubicon”.
Yet the ANC, the PAC and other black resistance organisations remained banned, with their leaders in jail or in exile.
South Africa’ s key trading partners, the European Economic Community and the United States, introduced punitive economicsanctions. The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, signed into law in the US in October 1986, was seen by many as the final blow that would break stubborn Nationalist resistance. Yet in Nerves of Steel, his book chronicling the story of the Haggie group, former Rand Daily Mail Editor Rex Gibson observed:“ As it happened, though, the wound was painful but not mortal”.
Nevertheless, as it had been for communism for some time, the writing was on the wall. Then Anglo American Chairman Gavin Relly led a high-powered business delegation to Lusaka for talks with the ANC. He and his party came home convinced that the government had to free Nelson Mandela and negotiate the country’ s future.
Industrial unrest and intimidation continued. Reports streamed in of illegal strike action, overtime bans and factory occupations. Union members gave their support to sanctions and disinvestment. In 1988 the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa( NUMSA) triggered the industry’ s first national strike by 25 000 members at 120 companies. It lasted three weeks.
President Botha bowed out, to be replaced by a man widely viewed as more enlightened and flexible – FW de Klerk. The path de Klerk was to take would dramatically re-shape the nation’ s destiny …
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