Bradley Proposes Wider City Policy AgainstApartheid

Flanked by local civil rights leaders and clergymen, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley on Tuesday recommended an expansion of the city’s anti-apartheid policy, calling for a partial ban on contracts with firms doing business in South Africa.

Bradley made it clear he was pressing ahead with the proposed ban despite a city attorney’s opinion last month that it might violate a state law prohibiting discriminatory contracts.

“We may disagree with the city attorney or any other legal expert,” Bradley said, adding, “We’ve taken what I believe is the minimum step within the framework of the law as I understand it.”

Deputy Mayor Tom Houston was quoted last month describing the city attorney’s opinion as “asinine.”

Bradley’s plan, requiring City Council approval, could cause the city to stop buying goods and services from as many as 74 companies that have business ties with South Africa, as well as contracts with the city. The companies range from multinational corporations, such as IBM and General Electric, to some of the city’s prominent law and accounting firms, according to Houston and City Controller Rick Tuttle.

In the future, such companies would be ineligible for about $100 million in city business under the mayor’s proposal, Tuttle said.

However, the $100 million represents only about 13% of all the city’s contracts for goods and services. The remaining 87% are awarded on the basis of competitive bidding and cannot be restricted under the City Charter, according to Bradley.

Thus, the ban on business with South Africa-related firms would apply only in non-competitive contracts. Even there, however, the ban would be lifted under the mayor’s proposal when its enforcement “would foreseeably result in significant additional costs for the city.”

The loopholes notwithstanding, the mayor defended his proposal as “a prudent, fiscally responsible action that will strike hard at those businesses which ignore the fact that their economic activities prop up a brutal, racist system.”

Deputy City Atty. Lewis Gutierrez, who wrote the opinion on the mayor’s proposal, said on Tuesday that despite his concerns about its legality, the proposal could be defended in court.

“We think we can raise good, solid arguments in its defense. Whether we would prevail or not, I can’t say,” Gutierrez said.

The state law that troubles Gutierrez was passed in 1976 to prevent compliance with an Arab League boycott of Israeli goods and Jewish-owned businesses. The law prohibits contracts that require discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, ancestry or national origin.

If the mayor’s South African policy were challenged under the law, Gutierrez said the city would argue that the law was narrowly focused and not meant to interfere with the right of a California city to regulate its contracts.

Last August, the City Council approved the first stage of Bradley’s anti-apartheid policy, which recommended that the city’s three pension funds, worth an estimated $4.7 billion, be purged of stocks in companies with connections to South Africa. In addition, the mayor’s policy called for the withdrawal of city funds from banks doing business in South Africa.

Two Funds

Officials of two of the three funds adopted Bradley’s recommendation and are in the process of determining which stocks should be sold, according to spokesmen for the funds. However, officials of the $1.2-billion Water and Power Employees Retirement Plan have not adopted the plan or even discussed it since last June, said Vincent Foley, president of the fund’s board of administration.

On hand Tuesday to praise the mayor’s latest proposal were Mark Ridley-Thomas, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles; John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League; the Rev. Thomas Kilgore, retired pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Los Angeles, and Rabbi Allen Freehling, president of the Los Angeles Board of Rabbis.

However, one of the clergyman present, Rabbi Abner Weiss, who said he spent most of his life in South Africa, said he had reservations about the mayor’s latest proposal, because he said it could end up penalizing those companies in South Africa that are working for racial equality.

“As a political statement, I think what the mayor had to say is very important,” Weiss said. “But as policy, it needs refinement. It could hurt people it ought to help.”

Bradley said he will leave it up to the City Council to decide whether companies that are working for social change in South Africa should be excluded from the ban.