The Economics of the Colour Bar

IN harmony with the spirit of the ‘group areas’ policy has been the incorporation of overt ‘job reservation’ into the Industrial Conciliation Act by amendments introduced in 1956 and 1959. This step has rendered more specific and deliberate the exclusions which had previously been stealthily achieved through the standard rate principle since the inception of the Act in 1924 and quite honestly through the Mines and Works Act of 1926 and the Native Building Workers’ Act of 1951. It has tended to determine the broad occupational structure of society by authority instead of the market, and on a racial basis instead of by trainable ability. One consequence has been (especially since the 1959 amendment) that any powers which Coloured employees may have come to acquire under the original Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924 have now been rendered of little or no effect. In 1957 it had been possible for a Coloured union to strike (legally, although not successfully) against job reservation. The possibility of similar legal resistance in future has now been removed.

ARBITRARY POWERS OF JOB RESTRICTION

In introducing the ‘job reservation’ amendments, the Nationalists did not refrain from appealing to the emotions aroused by the term ‘exploitation’. Their object, they claimed, was to protect the white man from exploitation by the other races – that is, by the less privileged classes with lower standards. Naturally they persevered with the hypocrisy of being equally concerned with the well-being of all. Under the Act, the Minister of Labour is given power to act in the interests of all employees, irrespective of their race or colour, to defend them from inter-racial competition. How obviously just and fair such arbitrary powers can always be represented to be! But the Minister is in fact authorised to reserve defined types of work for particular races alone; that is, he may forbid that any specified kind of job shall be performed by people of any specified race, or enact that it shall be reserved for a particular race. Within the discriminatory determinations so enacted, even the numbers of the various race groups who may be employed can be dictated by him. One provision actually authorises determinations which may remove the right of any race to a form of employment which it has long enjoyed.1 And the fact that the majority of the employees in the specific jobs reserved for Whites are at present Whites does not alter the fact that the reservation denies, on ground of colour not of skill, the right of non-Whites to qualify for some of the better-paid openings in an industry.

The latest job reservation as I write has specified seven crafts in the building trade2 which (at the request of two all-white labour unions) may not in the future be undertaken by Coloured employees in the Western Cape (and certain other districts in the Cape and Natal). Yet the Coloured make up 75 per cent of the building artisans in the Western Cape.

The Minister is advised in respect of job reservation by an Industrial Tribunal established by the Act but, as has become typical of legislation under the cult of state intervention, he and his advisers have been accorded the widest powers, including almost unrestricted rights of discrimination (i) between areas (which means, of course, between constituencies), (ii) between individual undertakings (which will make managements wary of openly opposing governmental policies), and (iii) between different industries (which may force industrial associations to feel that they must be obsequious or subservient to the Minister), etc. The Act goes so far as to declare that the tribunal ‘may use any method of differentiation or discrimination it may deem expedient’.

COLOUR–BLIND MARKET versus INTERVENTION

It is in arbitrary frustrations of the profit system, imposed through delegated legislation or administrative jurisdiction of this nature, that some of the most serious forms of colour injustice are being currently maintained. Every discrimination explicity authorised in the detail of 1956 and 1959 amendments of the Act is of a type which clearly aims at preventing entrepreneurs from substituting, for the collective benefit, the least-cost method of achieving any kind of demanded output; and that means, in the sphere covered by the Act, preventing managements (under the discipline of the loss-avoidance, profit-seeking incentives) from making the most productive use of the powers of the people.3

It may be objected, of course, that job reservations represent a mere abuse of state authority. But without government intervention to restrain the movement of labour, could such discriminations persist in a market that is colour-blind and race-blind?

The actual development of job reservation determination will occur according to the way in which the present and future governments exercise the virtually totalitarian discretion which Parliament has conferred on them; but under the necessity of winning elections with wholly white constituencies, it seems that the almost inevitable outcome will be the imposition upon industry in general of explicit colour bars similar to those incorporated in the Mines and Works Act of 1926 by the Labour-Nationalist Pact Government. As the Cape Times recently commented in discussing job reservation, ‘it is always at the bread and butter level where most votes are likely to be gained, that the Coloured people are most discriminated against’.4 And in Natal it is the Indians who may now expect to be increasingly prejudiced. The latest determination, which withdraws from them the right to serve as barmen (although they may still serve drinks in hotel lounges), seems to be an indication of what is in prospect.

5The following are among some of the job reservations which have already been made in favour of the Whites in certain areas: lift attendants (elevator operators); drivers of transport vehicles in certain spheres; ambulance drivers (even when carrying non-Whites); traffic policemen (where non-Whites had rendered excellent service for some time previously, in Cape Town); firemen; barmen.

6The seven crafts are: stone masonry; marble masonry; joinery; woodworking machinery; electrical wiring; letter cutting and stone decoration; shop, office and bank fittings.

7One of the main reasons for the discriminatory powers assumed in the Industrial Conciliation Act amendments of 1956 and 1959 appears to have been a wish to ensure that, in times of developing depression, the non-Whites (i.e. the non-voters) shall be deprived of their jobs before any of the Whites. But it will not work as easily as this in practice. Without the cheap labour of Africans and other non-Whites, more employment openings for Whites will be destroyed than will be created. On the other hand, the intention of some job reservations already made seems to have been to ‘create employment’ for unemployed Whites.

8Cape Times, I May, 1963.

• 1The system has recently been changed. Any African may now choose whether he wishes to be subject to tribal or Portuguese law. If he chooses the latter, he has the right to vote (whatever that means in a dictatorship) but he then becomes liable to taxation.
• 2Inter-marriage is a crime in South Africa. It is officially encouraged in Mozambique.
• 3The present government of the Republic of South Africa deny that this is the purpose of apartheid (separate development). I propose, however, to show why that must be the consequence of their policy.
• 4See Bibliography, p. 183.
• 5Some injustices may be due more to class barriers than to colour barriers. For instance, there is much resentment felt against Portugal as an intransigent colonial power. But no legally enacted colour bars exist in any Portuguese territory; and a South African who crosses into Mozambique is at once struck by the wholly different attitude, at least superficially, towards colour. Yet the overwhelming majority of the Africans of Mozambique are extremely poor. Some critics conclude that Portugal maintains a de facto if not a legal colour bar. But there are approximately an equal number of Whites and non-Whites with ‘assimilado’ status (that is, who have achieved both literacy and the ability to live at defined civilised standards) who have long enjoyed absolute equality of rights before the law. Yet only 160,000 out of the population of 6.6 million enjoy this status and only 5 per cent of the non-white assimilados are Africans (the rest are Indians and half-castes). If the evident backwardness of the masses is caused by deliberate policy rather than by unrestrained population growth and a paucity of natural resources, there is certainly cause for complaints of class injustice, but not of colour injustice. But educated and responsible non-Whites are not subjected, in the Portuguese territories, to the indignities and humiliations they suffer in South Africa.
• 6Some injustices may be due more to class barriers than to colour barriers. For instance, there is much resentment felt against Portugal as an intransigent colonial power. But no legally enacted colour bars exist in any Portuguese territory; and a South African who crosses into Mozambique is at once struck by the wholly different attitude, at least superficially, towards colour. Yet the overwhelming majority of the Africans of Mozambique are extremely poor. Some critics conclude that Portugal maintains a de facto if not a legal colour bar. But there are approximately an equal number of Whites and non-Whites with ‘assimilado’ status (that is, who have achieved both literacy and the ability to live at defined civilised standards) who have long enjoyed absolute equality of rights before the law. Yet only 160,000 out of the population of 6.6 million enjoy this status and only 5 per cent of the non-white assimilados are Africans (the rest are Indians and half-castes). If the evident backwardness of the masses is caused by deliberate policy rather than by unrestrained population growth and a paucity of natural resources, there is certainly cause for complaints of class injustice, but not of colour injustice. But educated and responsible non-Whites are not subjected, in the Portuguese territories, to the indignities and humiliations they suffer in South Africa.
• 7I shall illustrate my thesis almost entirely by reference to experience in the Republic of South Africa where I have been living whilst my ideas were forming. But the lessons learned from a study of colour bars, apartheid and other manifestations of colour prejudice in South Africa, are of direct relevance wherever skin pigmentation or other racial characteristics serve as a principle for confining individuals to any sort of economic or social inferiority.
• 8Without attempting a comprehensive account of colour relations – economic, social or political – in South Africa, I shall try to identify (a) the forces that have tended to dissolve the economic and social inferiority of the non-white classes, and (b) the opposing forces – constituting the injustice – that have tended, deliberately or otherwise, to perpetuate this inferiority. In the final Chapter I shall sum up what I hope the reader himself will have gathered from the facts and interpretations presented about the nature of these forces.