There are people who question whether the Freedom Charter represents the interests of the working class. This doubt sometimes arises from a confusion between working-class demands that are also in the interests of other classes, and demands which are purely or primarily beneficial to workers.

While a demand for adequate education is in the interests of all classes, it is no less a workers’ demand. Workers have an interest in peace. They have an interest in cultural development. They need freedom from arbitrary arrest. They need a house to live in and they need recreational facilities. In short, they have needs as workers and as human beings who have to exist outside the workplace.

While the Charter is not a programme of the working class alone, it nevertheless primarily reflects its interests. Some clauses of the Charter are socialist in orientation and are addressed much more profoundly to working-class interests than would be the case with any bourgeois document.

This worker orientation is attributable to the development of the labour struggle, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, and the part played by Sactu in collecting workers’ demands. Two Sactu members, Ben Turok and Billy Nair, introduced and spoke to the clause of the Charter which reads “The people shall share in the country's wealth”, a clause which clearly corresponds to workers’ interests.

Many other aspects of the Charter are profoundly working-class in orientation. The clause “There shall be work and security” deals with such matters as the “right and duty of all to work”. It also asserts the right to form trade unions, the abolition of child labour, compound labour, the “tot” system and contract labour.

The clause entitled “There shall be houses, security and comfort” declares the right to decent housing and that slums should be demolished and unused housing space made available to the people. Rent and prices will be lowered. Instead of the present situation, where “surplus” food is destroyed, the Charter declares that no one would be allowed to go hungry.