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Although I had been active in the labour movement since the days of my youth, my election to the position of general secretary the union was purely fortuitous. In 1927 I entered the University the Witwatersrand to study economics and law, with the hope one day being called to the Bar. Having no means, I found odd jobs to support myself. On the 31st March 1927, I was appointed part-time secretary to the Witwatersrand Middelmen Tailors' Association, an organisation of about one hundred craftsmen) were in law neither employers nor employees but independent tractors. They had their own workshops but considered themÂes workers; indeed many of them boasted of a militant trade in tradition. But despite these claims, some of them mercilessly sited those who worked for them, especially the younger women. As secretary of the M.T.A., I came into close contact with members of the trade union (which was then known as the Witwatersrand Tailors' Association) working in the tailoring industry learned a great deal about the workers' conditions, and about the trade. I was familiar with labour law, and helped to establish the Industrial Council for the Bespoke Tailoring Industry, under the provisions of the Industrial Conciliation Act. I was also appointed secretary to the Council on a part-time basis. The Council, which consisted of an equal number of representatives of the W.T.A. and the Transvaal Merchant Tailors' Association, duly concluded an agreement for the industry, which I, as secretary, had largely to administer, and this brought me into still closer contact with the workers. My labour sympathies were well known, and in October 1928, when Dan Colraine, the secretary of the W.T.A. resigned, many of the workers begged me to stand as candidate for the vacant position. I agreed, but as there were three other candidates, I thought there was little chance of my being elected. To my surprise, I received 90% of the votes in a secret ballot; and on the 14th November I walked straight from the University into the offices of the union, with the vague hope of resuming my studies at some later date.
The union was divided into two distinct sections: (a) the Bespoke Tailoring Section, and (b) the Factory Section. Each had its own committee and there was a Central Executive Committee to manage the affairs of the union as a whole. The union was a party to two Industrial Councils, the Industrial Council for the Bespoke Tailoring Industry, Witwatersrand, and the Industrial Council for the Clothing Industry, Transvaal, and each council having jurisdiction over its own section of the industry as well as its separate industrial agreement. The agreement for the Bespoke Tailoring Industry provided much higher wage rates and better conditions of employment.
The membership of the union was about 1,750, of whom just over two-thirds were in the Factory Section. The finances of the union were administered properly and there were up-to-date and accurate financial records. Almost everything else seemed to be in a state of chaos. Not even copies of the industrial agreements, which regulated wages and other conditions of the members, could be found in the office.
The three committees to which I was directly responsible consisted of higher-paid workers in the industry. Eight were from Britain and the rest came from Eastern Europe, except Mr. G. Malan, who was the only Afrikaner on the committee. The women workers, who constituted about 75% of the total membership, were not represented at all on any of the committees.
The men had a long trade union tradition and many had taken part in trade union struggles in their countries of origin, as well as in South Africa. They belonged to the old school of trade unionists-knowing little and caring less about labour law and economics. The endless, cumbersome provisions of the South African industrialists laws and the employers' arguments about payability, production, profits, etc., irritated and had little interest for them.
Some considered themselves "militants" and often made revolutionary speeches, but several of these, who later became employers in the industry, proved worse than the traditional capitalist employers.
There were no records of the previous activities of the union, for a few odd letters and sets of minutes; but from long talks with old tailors, I gathered the following story.
Toward the end of the last century, groups of tailoring workers, all master craftsmen in Johannesburg and Cape Town, began to organise themselves into unions. Small organisations sprang up, on sporadic strikes against sweating conditions, and then disappeared. Only after 1913 did the tailoring workers of Johannesburg succeed in establishing a permanent organisation which conducted regular trade union activity, made agreements with their employers, organised strikes, and succeeded in securing higher wages and better conditions. In the early 'twenties, Frank Glass, a very miser, speaker and writer, was elected secretary. In 1927, led and left South Africa. Dan a boilermaker succeeded him by trade, who had been sentenced to two imprisonments for "sedition" in the 1922 strike.
The appalling conditions which prevailed in the clothing n the early years are described in the Report of the Select committee of the Union House of Assembly on the Regulation (Specified Trades) Bill, May, 1917 (S.C. 4-1917). In four of the Report, the Committee found that "the payment of wages below what may be called the subsistence is common".
Walter Marshall, the managing director of Hepworth's limited, one of the leading firms of Cape Town at that time, in page 30 of the Report that apprentices started at 4s. week and improvers got from 7s. 6d. to 10s. a week. Since there was no legal definition of the terms "apprentice" and improver", the employer could decide, entirely at his discretion, how long a worker remained an apprentice and when he reached " status of improver.
Mr. Tobin, the proprietor of the Union Clothing Manufacturing Company, in his evidence, told the Committee that:
The mother or guardian agrees on the question of the first payment and what she is to get after trial. It may be 5s for a start, but if it is a girl who has just left school, say, and is a little more educated, she is not usually allowed to start for less than 7s. 6d. or 10s., and if I do not suit her she is not compelled to remain with me-there are many other factories", (Page 52.).
He continues:
"As I said, I am in favour of a minimum wage for women workers and the average wages which I pay to the experienced hands is 17s. 6d. That is what I consider a fair average but I could not agree to that as a minimum. If the Board has to fix a minimum wage, I should say a reasonable figure for the experienced hands, girls over eighteen, would be 10s." (Page 55.)
He admitted (page 57) that about three-quarters of the employees were earning fewer than 17s. 6d. a week.
Another witness, Mrs. Agnes Cooke, president of the Women's Citizens Club, stated that returns, which she received, from employers showed that the wages paid to girl learners ranged from 2s. 6d. to 10s. a week, maximum. In some cases, the girls had to give their services free for six months. Often these unpaid workers were then dismissed and other beginners taken on in their places.
Dealing with conditions apart from wages, Mr. Middleman, a member of the firm of A. Fraser and Company, Clothiers, of Cape Town, stated (page 88):
"There is no supervision and arrangements for sanitation leave much to be desired. From my own knowledge I san say that the hours worked in some of these places are terrible. There is no limit whatever. They work Saturday afternoons and Sundays too; if you go through the town you can hear the machines working all over the place, perhaps more in little workshops than in private houses".
The Select Committee recommended that minimum wage legislation be instituted. A law to regulate wages of young workers was introduced in 1920; it proved valueless and was later repealed.
In 1918, the first Factories Act was introduced, purporting to regulate hours of work, and rules for hygiene and safety in factories. The Act was badly drafted and little attention was given to enforcing it. Exploitation continued unchecked for many years, until the workers began to organise into trade unions. Thus the Wage Board, in its report for three years ended 28th February, 1929, states (paragraph 299):.
"There was much sweating of employees in this industry at the time of the sitting of the Economic and Wage Commission in 1925. The low wages prevailing in the Cape Peninsula may be seen from the proposal put before that Commission by the Clothing Manufacturers' Association of the Western Province as an improvement of the then prevailing rates, that scale being as follows:
Per Week
s. d.
First week .. .. 10 0
Second Year .. .. 12 6
Third Year .. .. 15 0
Fourth Year .. .. 17 6
Paragraph 307 says:
The average weekly wages of female employees in the clothing industry in February 1926 are shown in the following table: -
Area Juveniles under 21 Adults
European Coloured European Coloureds
Per week per week per week per week
Cape peninsula .. 13 10 12 4 1 3 10 19 11
Port Elizabeth .. 19 8 12 11 1 3 4 15 8
Durban .. .. 17 6 19 4 1 3 11 1 3 10
King Williamstown.. 13 4 _____ 13 6 _____
In 1926, the wages of the Transvaal garment workers were governed by an industrial agreement, and are not included in the Wage Board report.
Clothing factories in the Transvaal started during the First World War, but made little progress until 1925, when the Pact Government formed between General Hertzog of the Nationalist Party and Colonel Creswell of the Labour Party granted industries a measure of tariff protection, and encouraged industrial development generally.
In 1928, about 250 men and an equal number of women were employed in the Bespoke Section. Of these, about two hundred worked in four large workshops, where conditions were tolerably good and the provisions of the agreement were strictly observed. Another hundred worked in small workshops, which were also well conducted. The rest were employed in about a hundred little workshops, owned by merchant tailors or by middlemen tailors, where the number of employees ranged from one to five. In these workshops conditions were poor, bad, or terrible.
Middlemen tailors worked for merchant tailors on a contract system, with rates fixed in a log; but most merchant tailors did not observe the contract rates, and the middlemen in their turn sweated their workers. Contract rates were not legally enforceable. On the other hand, the wages, hours of work and other conditions of employment for workers were governed by agreement under the Industrial Conciliation Act and could be enforced by criminal prosecutions. The wages of £8 a week for a first-class tailor, £6 10s. for a second-class tailor, £3 15s. for a first-class tailors and £3 2s. d. for a second-class tailors compared favourably with prevailing standards in other industries, but scores of workers received considerably less than the minimum provided in the agreement-some as little as half or one-third. Working hours were fixed by agreement at 48 per week, but many workers, when they left the workshop, had to take work home with them and toil away until late at night, Saturdays and Sundays, often without receiving any extra pay. Here are two examples of the sweating that prevailed.
Some time in 1929, in the course of an investigation, I found a small workshop where the employer kept a mother and two daughters on the premises from Wednesday until Sunday. They worked practically day and night, and even slept in the workshop. On another occasion, I found a young woman of nineteen who had been working continuously from seven a.m. until five o'clock the following morning without receiving any extra pay. Some of these workshops kept no wage registers at all; others "cooked" their registers and made workers sign for wages which they had not received.
Many of the middlemen and merchant tailors also worked very long hours-often until early in the morning-and had to struggle to make ends meet.
The most exploited section consisted of about two hundred Indian workers, many of whom were young boys from twelve to fifteen. They were not members of the union and the vast majority knew nothing about trade unionism. As most of them hardly spoke any English, it was difficult to organise them, and still more difficult to enforce the provisions of the agreement protecting them. Every little tailoring shop seemed to be a family concern, where sons, nephews and other relatives were employed. Their wages on the whole were probably a quarter or less than the amount to which they were entitled under the agreement. There were very few
Coloured and African workers employed in the tailoring industry. The clothing industry employed less than a hundred white men and over 1,000 women, nearly all Afrikaners, who had only recently left the poverty-stricken rural areas to find employment in the cities.