prolonged drought. The state itself continued to apply its Civilised Labour
policy, providing sheltered employment for Whites and paying its unskilled
white laborers Inore than twice as much as its unskilled African laborers."?
To cope with their predicament, Africans formed trade unions and
organized numerous boycotts and strikes, although the Industrial Concil-
iation Act excluded Africans from participation in the collective bargain-
ing process and the government made strikes illegal. By 1945, the Council
of Non-European Trade Unions claimed a strength of 158,000 members in
119 unions, amounting to 40 percent of African employees in commerce
and manufacturing.s?
The inhabitants of Alexandra, a township in the
northeastern part of Johannesburg, repeatedly and successfully boycotted
the buses that took them to work when the companies tried to raise the
fares. For ten days in 1943, for example, 20,000 boycotters got up at three
in the morning and walked to work, returning home at nine in the
evening.s!
The crucial terrain for labor relations was, as ever,the mining industries.
Between 1939 and 1948, police or departmental inspectors reported over a
hundred gold and coal mine disturbances to the Native Affairs Depart-