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The lead-up to the 1922 Rand Revolt

16th August 2013

By: Jade Davenport

Creamer Media Correspondent

  

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During the first three months of 1922, at a time when South Africa was gripped by a severe economic depression, 22 000 white employees working in the Witwatersrand’s coal and gold mines, engineering workshops and power utilities downed their tools and took part in a strike of such magnitude that it brought the country to the very brink of revolution. Indeed, the 1922 Rand Revolt remains the most serious industrial action in South Africa’s economic history, being unsurpassed in its scale of worker militancy, violence and State brutality.

The cause of the uprising had very deep roots, the deepest of which can be traced to the end of the First World War.

The effects of the Great War had such a devastating impact on Britain’s economy and prompted such high rates of inflation that, a few months after the signing of the Armistice, the country was forced to officially abandon the gold standard – which had immutably fixed the price of gold to £4 5s/oz since 1717 – in order to allow the sterling to depreciate. Such a move meant that the sterling value of gold was allowed to float, reaching a level of £6 10s/oz by February 1920.

The premium of 30 shillings per ounce of gold gave a new lease of life for South Africa’s gold mining industry, particularly since many of the mines had struggled to make a profit at the height of the war. (Indeed, 1914 to 1918 had been a difficult period for the gold mines, as they were forced to contend with a shortage of manpower and skills, the rationing of food, a scarcity of essential goods and mining equipment and considerably inflated working costs.)

Inevitably, on the back of the higher gold price, mining company profits soared across the board and the need to stringently manage costs and to bear down on the unions became less of a pressing issue. In fact, such was the increase in profits that the white workers were granted wage increases for 1920.

However, the price of gold at £6 10s/oz was not sustainable and throughout 1921 it began to fall to such an extent that, by the end of the year, gold was trading at just £4 5s/oz. At the same time, the South African mines began to be challenged by a very sharp increase in working costs, largely the result of a postwar deflationary recession that had started in the US the previous year and spread across the world.

The extent to which expenses increased is illustrated by the fact that, while in 1913 working costs were 17s 11d per ton of ore milled, by 1920 they had increased to 25s 8d per ton.

The only area where costs could be cut to alleviate the mines’ rapidly rising expenditure was the wage bill. In particular, the ‘grey area’ of semiskilled employment – jobs relating to drill sharpening, waste packing, pipe and track laying, rough timbering, whitewashing and similar types of work – was an aspect of the wage bill that the mine owners believed they could drastically reduce. However, semiskilled employment was a very sensitive issue, especially for white workers, who fully realised that they could easily be replaced by black workers, who were completely capable of performing such tasks and who could be paid significantly lower wages.

After much agitation, the white mine-workers had managed to force the Chamber of Mines to adopt a status quo agreement in September 1918, under which the existing allocation of semi-skilled work to the different race groups was frozen. In other words, such a colour bar agreement reserved certain semiskilled jobs for white workers only.

However, towards the end of 1921, in the midst of spiralling working costs, the mining companies began to rethink the viability of that agreement, especially in view of the fact that, for that particular year, the industry would pay out £10.64-million to its 21 500 white employees, while paying only £5.96-million to its 179 000-strong black workforce.

It was in that context that, in November 1921, the Chamber of Mines decided to renege on the agreement by eliminating the colour bar in all semiskilled positions, which would allow the companies to replace a large percentage of white semiskilled workers with their cheaper black counterparts and to reduce the wages paid to those white workers that were allowed to keep their jobs.

Such a decision ultimately threatened the jobs of over 15 000 white mineworkers employed along the extent of the Reef, although the chamber insisted that only 2 000 would be affected.

Inevitably, in the era of heightened white worker agitation and militancy, which had prevailed since 1913, the South African Industrial Federation (SAIF), to which the white trade unions related to mining were affiliated, had little choice but to refuse to accept such a change in the labour policy.

Thus pressurised, the SAIF balloted its members in early January and just over half of its 24 000 members registered to vote opted to go on strike over the Chamber of Mines’ proposals. The strike officially began after the last shift on the night of January 9, although the coal miners officially went on strike over a five shilling wage dispute a week earlier. The next day, there were 22 000 workers out on strike and all the mines, engineering shops and power stations except one, which was allowed to keep essential services going, along the extent of the Witwatersrand Basin came to a standstill. • To be continued

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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