The accumulation of power, however, cannot rest on increased numbers alone. For organisations to grow and maintain membership, a degree of success and of delivery is essential. Workers flocked to these unions because they witnessed the increased wages, the improved conditions and the growing control over their working lives – personal as much as material gains, as black workers’ dignity was enhanced with the sense that their humanity was at last being recognised.
Chapter Four
Breaking the apartheid mould: 1980–1982
The strike weapon is the cornerstone of union power. Its potency critically depends on its collective character, as individual workers cannot bring a factory to a standstill – and are easy to replace.
Most strikes erupt spontaneously and are followed by union authorisation. In such cases, management has less opportunity to plan a response than it does in official disputes. Wildcat strikes are often, therefore, the most effective way for workers to insist on a say in matters affecting them. Rick Fantasia remarks that solidarity is welded to the act of opposition, forged during the strike itself. Like Hyman, he believes that the spontaneous strike, independent of official bargaining routines, is often most effective in articulating and redressing grievances.1
In the early 1980s, strikes returned in force to South African. More spontaneous strikes broke out on the East Rand in 1981–1982 than in any other period in South African labour history,2 and many of the strikers were not unionised. Mawu, and to some extent Naawu, understood that wildcat strikes could be harnessed to build national worker power. In its appreciation of the power of spontaneous action, it was heir to German socialist Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of spontaneity. She wrote of the Russian revolutionary movement: ‘Its most important and fruitful tactical turns of the last decade were not “invented” by determinate leaders of the movement, and much less by leading organisations, but were … the spontaneous product of an unfettered movement itself.’ She asserted, echoing Vladimir Lenin, that ‘activity itself educates the masses’.3
In metal, there were pivotal disputes which advanced labour’s agenda and which show how power was built in a multifaceted way. These disputes struck at the heart of capitalist exploitation but also ruptured the apartheid mould when grand apartheid was at its height. In different ways, these strikes attacked divisions entrenched by the state. They expressed workers’ newfound confidence and determination to assert control over their working conditions, the fruit of the painstaking organisational work of the 1970s, and the new labour dispensation. These unions, with their emphasis on workers’ control, brought a blossoming of new ideas, demands, tactics and innovative struggles on a scale never before witnessed in the South African labour movement.
At the heart of this creative energy was a dynamic relationship between union intellectuals, union leaders and members. Militant worker action sometimes took union strategists by surprise and was seen as misdirected, but it prompted new thinking and a reformulation of demands and strategies. Such rethinking was often not what workers initially demanded, but represented a refocusing and deepening that struck more directly at the heart of their exploitation. In this way, the unions began to confront deeper restructuring issues with capital. Many struggles were lost or not immediately resolved but remained in the unions’ collective memory, to be returned to later or built on when the opportunity arose. Unions sometimes lacked the resources to cope and yet creative approaches moved their agenda forward and opened up new strategic opportunities which pushed back the frontiers of factory control.
Tarrow remarks on how social movements which are not ‘bound by institutional routines’ give rise to leaders who are highly creative in ‘selecting forms of collective action. Leaders invent, adapt and combine various forms of contention’.4 Mawu and Naawu used a range of innovative tactics, including go-slows, working to rule, grasshopper strikes, trials of strength, demonstration stoppages, consumer boycotts, legal action, sleep-ins, strategic negotiations, community solidarity, house visits, fund-raising strategies and international solidarity. A battery of tactics might be applied in a single dispute, and new ways of sustaining solidarity were devised.
Initially, unionists relied heavily on the element of surprise, using their superior knowledge of labour relations procedures and laws. Then, as employers became more sophisticated, unions were forced to revise their tactics and to view defeat as an opportunity to develop a more effective way forward. The unions’ political independence also gave them the flexibility to respond rapidly and to alter strategic and policy directions without being fettered by external dogmas and bureaucracy. They could debate and freely choose their strategies in consultation with their members, to whom they were alone accountable. It was this freedom to manoeuvre that allowed for such an explosion of innovation.
Strikes enabled the unions to force their way into factories, and every act of defiance, every success, had a ripple effect in spurring on other workers to stand up to their white employers. This increased the size and power of the metal unions, which in the 1980s expanded to every corner of South Africa. Three disputes or waves of contention were central to the rise of the metal unions in the early 1980s: the Volkswagen strike of 1980, the 1980–81 pension strikes and the East Rand strike wave of 1981–82.
The great strike: Volkswagen 1980
The strike at German multinational Volkswagen, Uitenhage’s largest employer, had a significant impact on bargaining demands and the style of industrial action in the 1980s.
The great strike: 1980 Volkswagen living wage strike with union leaders addressing workers (Wits archives)
The factory was organised by UAW/Numarwosa in the late 1970s, and recognition, including the right to bargain wages on the Eastern Cape auto industrial council, was quickly secured. But as the union’s general secretary Freddie Sauls pointed out, a recognition agreement is only as strong as workers’ power to enforce it.5 Worker grievances at VW simmered below the surface.
Unlike the mass of Mawu’s members on the East Rand, they were not migrants and their prime concern was not job security. Most of VW’s African and coloured employees lived in urban townships and the former had urban residence rights, so that they could not be ‘endorsed out’ of the city if they lost their jobs.
Pay was the main grievance. Volkswagen declared proudly that it was paying above the poverty datum line (PDL), but workers pointed out that the PDL did not include clothing, furniture, schoolbooks, entertainment and other everyday expenses that whites took for granted. They resented the calculation of their living costs by academics remote from their deprivation. In advance of the 1980 industrial council round, they drew up their own ‘living wage’ figure based on a survey of workers’ needs and arrived at a minimum of R2 an hour, which they were determined to negotiate6 - this met resolute resistance from management, and after weeks of negotiations talks deadlocked with employers offering R1,40 an hour.7
On 15 June, workers arranged a report-back meeting in Uitenhage’s Jubilee Hall, but the chief magistrate banned it. Frustrated, they decided to strike on the next day and report to members on company premises. About 3 500 African and coloured workers downed tools in an illegal strike and gathered on the lawns outside the managing director’s office. After instructing shop stewards to negotiate, they waited on the company premises, fearing a lockout if they left.
A riot police officer warns Volkswagen workers to disperse outside the company’s Uitenhage plant in June 1980 (Jack Cooper Evening Post)
Meanwhile, news of the VW action spread and labour unrest erupted through local industry. At least a thousand workers downed tools over wages at 11 other