SUPPORT FOR SOUTH AFRICAN GOLD MINERS

WHEREAS, at this moment thousands of black workers in South African gold mines are staging walkouts and demonstrations. Employers are responding with violence using government police and security guards to break up and repress the strikers. Six miners have already been killed; and

WHEREAS, this incident is another chapter in the struggle by black workers in the Republic of South Africa to gain basic trade union rights; and

WHEREAS, the AFT is on record in support of the South African black labor movement and has consistently condemned the apartheid system of government in that country:

RESOLVED, that the AFT calls on the South African government:

• to cease the use of violence to suppress black South Africans;

• to extend full free and democratic trade union rights to all South African residents regardless of race;

• to cease the use of arbitrary detentions of trade unionists without due process, to weaken the development of the black trade union movement; and

RESOLVED, to reaffirm our support of the AFL-CIO Program of Support for Black Trade Unions in South Africa.