This paper by Evan Mantzaris provides a critical chronicle of a strike by radical white metalworkers at the Denver Engineering Works on the Witwatersrand, organised through a workers’ committee.
This was linked to the syndicalist International Socialist League, which had became interested in promoting a rank-and-file “shopstewards and workers committee” movement in the existing (white) unions following a visit by militant Bill Andrews to the UK. The committees were envisaged as a step to the inter-racial revolutionary One Big Union, complementing independent syndicalist unions amongst workers of colour
(FOR MORE on these developments, see Lucien van der Walt’s 2007 PhD or his recent paper in “Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World 1970-1940”, Brill 2010).
Taken from the Southern African Anarchist & Syndicalist History Archive.
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