Hundreds of Thousands Strike in S. Africa : Black Unions Defy Emergency Curbs to Start 3-Day Walkout

Hundreds of thousands of black South Africans, defying emergency restrictions, refused to report for work Monday, beginning a three-day general strike to protest proposed new labor legislation and a government clampdown on anti-apartheid groups.

There were scattered reports of violence, including a gasoline bomb attack on a commuter bus in Natal province that injured five people. Arsonists near Durban burned down a railway station, and a bomb blast damaged a rail line in the sprawling black township of Soweto near Johannesburg.

The three days of protest were called by the country’s largest black union federation, the 750,000-member Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and supported by many anti-apartheid groups, including the outlawed African National Congress, as well as Anglican Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu and other church leaders.

Labor Union Test

The “stayaway,” as political strikes are called here, was seen as a test of strength for the country’s black labor unions, whose activities have been hobbled by the two-year-old state of emergency under which union leaders have been jailed and meetings raided. Tougher restrictions were imposed in February against 17 anti-apartheid organizations, including COSATU.

Departing from past practice, dozens of employers threatened to sue the unions for lost profits and fire or discipline workers who went on strike this week. Employers had previously taken a less confrontational role in stayaways, usually refusing to pay workers who did not show up for work but taking no other action.

Businesses in major cities were severely affected by the protest, with 81% of workers in the Johannesburg area staying out and 67% in the Durban area, according to the Labor Monitoring Group at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Large grocery retailers reported absentee rates of 70% among black workers, and some white managers filled in at the checkout counters.

Few of the thousands of taxi vans that bring workers into Johannesburg from the satellite black townships were operating Monday. Trains bound for the city were nearly empty.

But the stayaway had little impact in rural areas and most small towns. Gold mining operations, the backbone of South Africa’s economy, were virtually unaffected.

The Chamber of Mines said that only about 9,000 of its 550,000 workers stayed away Monday. Last week, a court in one of the major gold mining centers had issued injunctions against the strike.

P.T.C. du Plessis, minister of manpower and public works in South Africa’s white minority-led government, said the stayaway was a failure. He reiterated the government’s position that the action was illegal.

In Soweto, home for about 2 million blacks, and another large Johannesburg-area township, Katlehong, Monday was as quiet as a Sunday. Most schools and some businesses did not open. Freshly painted signs on courtyard walls urged: “No Work--6, 7, 8.”

Soweto streets normally clogged with rush-hour commuters were nearly deserted.

In Johannesburg, near the main rail terminal, only a few of the dozens of hawkers who sell everything from apples to shampoo set up shop Monday. Services such as milk deliveries were hampered.

In a full-page advertisement in Monday’s newspapers, COSATU’s general secretary, Jay Naidoo, called on South Africans “to support our struggle for democracy and the right to speak, meet and organize for a democratic non-racial future.”

Although participation in the strike was less widespread in Cape Town, residents of two adjoining black townships said youths fired shots and stoned buses to prevent workers from traveling to jobs in the city.

COSATU and the National Council of Trade Unions, which together represent nearly 1.5 million black workers, are fighting a bill in Parliament that would weaken the right to strike, ban sympathy strikes and allow companies to sue unions for damages.

With the government’s restrictions on leading opposition groups in February, South African trade unions and churches consider themselves the only surviving voices of protest for the black majority, which has no vote in national affairs.

In fact, COSATU did not call directly for a work stoppage, which would have violated emergency regulations, but for three days of unspecified “protest action.” It said this was “one of the few remaining avenues of peaceful and legitimate protest available to us.”

Johannesburg Bureau researcher Mike Cadman assisted in the preparation of this story.