80,000 Black Metalworkers Set to Strike Today in S. Africa Over Pay

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — About 80,000 black metalworkers plan to strike today for higher pay, and South Africa’s critical mining industry faced similar action by more than 200,000 black employees, union officials said Monday.

The strikes could be the most widespread challenge so far by South Africa’s black workers against the authority of white magnates and their control of the country’s economy and industry.

Announcing the results of last week’s voting, Adrienne Bird, spokeswoman for the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, said that about 95% of the 52,000 workers who voted supported an indefinite stoppage to press wage demands.

“The strike will begin tomorrow morning,” she said Monday. “Apart from major stoppages in the mines, this will be the country’s first industrywide national strike.”

Marcel Golding, spokesman for the black National Union of Mine Workers, said officials were meeting Monday to settle details of a strike supported by a majority of the more than 200,000 black coal and gold miners polled last week.

Bird said the metalworkers’ union wants minimum wages in the steel and engineering industry raised to $76 a week from $48. She said the union is also seeking similar increases for higher-paid workers, a shorter workweek, maternity benefits for women and other improvements.

Employers offered to increase the minimum wage to $52.40 a week but refused all of the union’s other demands, Bird said.

The black miners’ union is seeking 30% increases for miners earning about $200 a month. The employers’ federation, the Chamber of Mines, offered and already has implemented pay increases of between 17% and 23%.

South Africa’s critical mining industry generates more than half of the country’s foreign income and employs 750,000 blacks, about 550,000 of them in the gold mining sector.