Document 48 - “The Anti-C.A.D. and the Trade Unions”, The Torch, 1 April 1958

From: South Africa's Radical Tradition, a documentary history, Volume Two 1943 - 1964, by Allison Drew

Document 48 - “The Anti-C.A.D. and the Trade Unions", The Torch, 1 April 1958

From the very beginning the Anti-C.A.D. Movement has been very concerned to get the organised workers to take their proper place and to play a full part in the national liberatory movement. This will be seen already from the discussions and resolutions of the Second Conference, held in 1944.

Reporting on the Conference, Bulletin No. 30 January 19th, 1944, said: "to view of the growing, unemployment (see "Cape Argus", Jan. 11th), particularly amongst Non-Europeans, artisans as well as unskilled and semi-skilled workers, the Conference decisions with regard to the Trade Unions and the Anti-C.A.D. Movement must be given great attention. The role that the C.A.C. plays in trying to set one section of the workers against another has already been demonstrated in their attempt to stir up against African workers in Cape Town. As the unemployment position ill more, the C.A.C. will be still further used by the Government and the to continue this foul task of deceiving the workers in order to protect the employers. Conference passed two resolutions on the Trade Union question:

(1) “This Conference instructs all local committees and Individual organisations to make every endeavour to enrol the organised workers, the Trade Unions, into the Anti-C.A.D. Movement, and calls upon all trade unionists to assist in this task". Conference urges the organised Trade Union Movement as represented by the Cape Federation of Labour Unions, the S.A. Trades and Labour Council, the Non-European Councils of Trade Unions (Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg) to call a special Conference to consider the disastrous effect of a C.A.C. and C.A.D. upon the status of Coloured workers in trade unions and thus upon the trade union movement as a whole".

"It is now for every individual worker and workers' organisations to take up this matter anew, and to impress upon the trade unions that the Anti-C.A.D. Movement is not attempting to interfere with their domestic affairs, but is trying to obtain their active co-operation against the C.A.C. which is a direct and immediate threat to the status of the Coloured worker and thus to the standard of the whole working class".

That was 1944. And in 1954, at its 5th National Conference, held in Cape Town on January 7th-8th, the Anti-C.A.D. re-affirmed its stand and urged the workers to fight against the policy of collaboration which was destroying them. The resolution on this declared:

"That this Conference:

(i) Condemns and rejects the increasingly fascistic legislation used or directed against the Trade Union Movement in South Africa, as evidenced by the Native Labour Settlement of Disputes Act of 1953, which destroys the right to strike, places the African workers under the Native Affairs Department, and extends the machinery of industrial oppression; by the Native Building Workers Act, which extend inferiority and segregation in work and wages; by the Suppression of Communism Act, which is used to decapitate the trade unions; by the proposed Schoeman Bill to divide the unions still further on racial lines, to increase competition and race-hatred among the workers; and by the threat to place the Coloured workers and their "Unions" under the Coloured Affairs Department;

(ii) Views these measures as the continuation and intensification of previous oppres­sive legislation introduced and applied by all Herrenvolk parties especially since the Act of Union, and as the inevitable consequence of denying citizenship to the Non-Europeans of South Africa;

(iii) Calls upon the workers to boycott the machinery of industrial collaboration, i.e. as in the Native Labour Settlement of Disputes Act;

(iv) Deplores and warns against the policy of adaptation, capitulation, collaboration, and of isolation from the National Liberatory Movement, preached and practised by the trade union bureaucracy, both White and Non-White, against the interests of the workers, both White and Non-White;

(v) Declares that without a consistent, principled struggle against trade union collaborationism the trade unions will be utterly destroyed and replaced by company and State unions unreservedly controlled by the Native Affairs Department and the Coloured Affairs Department;

(vi) Reaffirms the resolutions adopted during the past eleven years of the Anti-C.A.D. and N.E.U.M. on the necessity for Trade Union participation in the National Liberatory Movement in order to create free, unfettered, democratic, non-racial unions, and declares that the very life and future of the unions as well as the full development of the liberatory movement depends upon the struggle of the workers in their unions against the Herrenvolk and bureaucrat-collaborators, so that the trade unions may take their rightful place in the Anti-C.A.D. and the Non-European Unity Movement'."