Local lawyers and US class action lawyer Ed Fagan announced in Johannesburg on Saturday that they would be suing US company, Fluor International, for more than $700-million in damages for discriminatory wages paid to the company’s employees in South Africa in the 70s and 80s.
Representative for the Apartheid Claims Task Force, John Ngcebetsha, said the group would also be claiming a similar amount, yet to be confirmed, for the ”apartheid-style repressionary approach the company used to quell a strike by its employees on a Sasol plant in November 1987.
He said Fluor was contracted by coal-to-oil conversion SA company Sasol in 1975 and had admitted that it paid white local employees $4 an hour compared to $2.2 it paid to local black employees who had the same qualifications and experience.
”During a legal strike in 1987 for better wages, Fluor gave instructions to non-striking employees, Sasol/Fluor internal security employees, and even to some policemen that they wear Klu Klux Klan type hoods so that they could be identified against the strikers.
”They were also given manufactured sharp objects from the Fluor plant and ordered to assault the strikers, some of whom died, and others were injured and lost the use of limbs and eyes and were also set upon by police dogs,” Ngcebetsha said.
”The strikers were also retrenched by Fluor which in any case was illegal in SA because it had broken sanctions in force against this country by operating here.”
Ngcebetsha said arguments for the case would be heard in the Federal Court in New York on May 19. More than 3 000 claimants attended the meeting in Johannesburg addressed by the lawyers who explained the progress made with
regard to the lawsuit. Ngcebetsha said the task force was made up of local lawyers,
historians, investigative journalists and actuarial scientists, and Fagan was the group’s American correspondent and co-ordinating lawyer.
Fagan arrived in SA on Friday where he was involved in filing suit in the US for damages against Anglo America on behalf of victims of apartheid.
He is due to leave South Africa on Sunday after attending Saturday’s meeting with local lawyers and claimants. – Sapa