U.S. Raises for Blacks

U.S. companies that do business in South Africa have been under an unrelenting hailstorm of criticism from civil rights groups, labor unions, churchmen and Congressmen. Some critics have pressed the companies to pull out of the apartheid state altogether; others insist that they should remain and improve the lot of their nonwhite workers. Apparently the clamor has penetrated some important board rooms. At least 18 blue-chip corporations have sharply raised wages, fringe benefits and educational opportunities for black South Africans. And they accomplished these improvements with surprisingly little flak from the nation's segregationist establishment.

Polaroid, for example, now pays its black employees an average wage of $180 a month--up 52% in the past two years. Though that figure is still low by American, or white South African standards, it is impressive indeed for a country where many nonwhite workers earn considerably less than $115 a month, the average poverty line for a black city family of five. IBM provides free medical care for all black workers and schooling assistance for their children.

Polaroid and PepsiCo provide similar fringe benefits, and both companies have set up a $100,000 education trust fund for nonwhites called ASSET (for American-South African Study and Educational Trust).

Some U.S. companies, including General Motors and Ford, have assigned blacks to jobs, such as skilled assembly-line work and welding, that were previously reserved by law for whites. IBM and other companies have gone even further and assigned blacks to supervise whites, violating a sacrosanct taboo. The government has largely ignored such moves because of the acute scarcity of skilled labor in South Africa.

$50 a Month. Companies that offered greater opportunities to blacks have often found that their productivity and profits have increased proportionately: nonwhites who land coveted jobs tend to work very hard to keep them.

Says Helmut Hirsch, managing director of Frank & Hirsch, Polaroid's distributor in South Africa: "Our changes were not charitable. They were based on good management practices."

Such verligte (Afrikaans for enlightened) policies will have to spread much more widely, however, if the country's 15 million blacks are ever to become economically equal to its 3.8 million whites. Average salaries for nonwhites have risen 30.5% in the past three years, v. a 17.5% increase for whites, but the black average is still only about one-eighth the typical white scale. And the U.S. firms that have been raising black pay and benefits dramatically are a distinct minority; many American companies still hire black workers at minimum wages as startlingly low as $50 a month.

In order to prod the laggards into action, the U.S. State Department recently circulated to some 300 American companies that operate in South Africa a set of "fair employment guidelines." The State Department report subtly reminds the companies that, apartheid notwithstanding, no South African law puts a lid on the wages that can be paid to blacks.

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