Apartheid v. Profits

As an advocate and practitioner of white supremacy, South Africa's Prime Minister Johannes Strydom has few rivals. One of these is his brother-in-law Jan de Klerk, 54. Strydom appointed De Klerk, a onetime paid party official who has never been elected to Parliament, his Minister of Labor. Eager to curry more votes among the ardent white-supremacist farmers of the platteland, Minister de Klerk promptly ordered South Africa's garment industry to hold in reserve "for whites only" some 30,000 to 40,000 garment jobs, ranging in categories from cutter to supervisor.

The announcement struck the $150 million-a-year industry like a bombshell. The garment makers pay low wages, and only about 7,000 whites are willing to work for them. If the edict were put into effect, cried the clothing manufacturers, "we'd have to sack nearly 40,000 Negroes, and we can't get whites to take their place."

Outraged leaders of the nation's potent Federated Chamber of Industries bore down on Pretoria to protest De Klerk's interference with their business. De Klerk backed down and postponed enforcement of his order, but the garment workers' union was not satisfied. Last week it announced that some 12,000 Negro garment workers in the for-whites-only classification will "stay away from their jobs" (Negroes are not allowed to "strike" in South Africa) to drive home a hard fact seldom faced by Strydom's fanatics: a strict application of apartheid would paralyze South Africa's economy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.