Early History
Early trade unions were often for whites only, with organizations like the South African Confederation of Labour (SACoL) favouring employment policies based on racial discrimination. Trade unions organizing blacks appeared by 1917, and within two years the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Unions of Africa had been formed by people living on the streets of Cape Town. By the 1930s the South African Trades and Labour Council (SATLC) had united much of the country. The SATLC maintained an explicitly non-racial stance, and accepted affiliation of black trade unions, as well as calling for full legal rights for black trade unionists. Some black unions joined SATLC, while in the 1940s others affiliated with the Council of Non-European Trade Unions, raising it to a peak of 119 unions and 158,000 members in 1945.
In 1946, the CNETU with the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party pushed for the African Mine Workers' Strike to become a General Srike. The strike was broken by the police brutality which was part of the rise of the National Party (NP) and their slogan of apartheid as all black trade unions were violently suppressed.
Read more about this topic: Trade Unions In South Africa
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