From the Colour Bar to Apartheidīeginning about 1970, the internal contradictions of apartheid finally caused its slow demise. In central and local government employment the proportion of whites rose from 45 to 64 percent while the number and percentage of blacks correspondingly fell. Between 19 the number of whites employed by South African Railways rose from 4,760 to 17,783, or from 10 to 39 percent of employees, while the number of blacks fell from 37,564 to 22,008, or from 75 to 49 percent. Merle Lipton reported that the perverse tendency toward the employment of (more expensive) whites was evident after the proclamation of the 1924 Civilized Labour Policy (Lipton 1986). In fact, many industries were nationalized just to impose racial preference.
In a policy of “affirmative action,” state-run railways and other huge state enterprises preferentially hired and promoted less skilled whites. Hence, the final intervention of the Civilized Labour Policy was nationalization of businesses that employed large numbers of nonwhites. Ironically, the labor market rules that were intended to raise barriers against black workers blocked the path for what were commonly called “poor whites,” the lowest tier of the protected class.
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