It is clearly true that its weak organisational structures contributed to the defeat, yet Swilling fails to recognise the corollary in this – the relative power of capital in relation to the union’s strength. Mawu did not have the capacity or organised power to take on the country’s largest employer which was determined to force bargaining at industry level. In the circumstances, the union had no option but to admit defeat and use it as an opportunity to return to the drawing board. Ultimately the industrial council that Swilling lambasts Mawu for not ‘smashing’ was to become a source of industry-wide power for the union.
Swilling also argues that Mawu’s organisational weaknesses allowed for a split in the union as power began ‘shifting towards a leading stratum of personnel.’ This in turn entailed a decline in worker participation and worker control and the danger of a drift towards unrepresentative union bureaucracy. The union certainly suffered from organisational failings but it is also clear that the East Rand strike wave strengthened it. It popularised unions and their role in fighting for workers’ rights and established Mawu as the union of choice among South Africa’s largest concentration of metal workers. Workers were now organising themselves and coming to the union office. ‘We don’t have to go to the factories to recruit these days,’ commented one organiser.90
Paradoxically, Swilling draws a negative inference from the powerful worker leaders the strikes threw up, seeing the advanced shop steward echelon as the kernel of a union elite.91 In reality, thousands of workers, organised and unorganised and at every level of the labour movement, learned valuable lessons about the wielding of power during this upsurge. Many layers of leadership emerged in the union and the community, not solely at the level of advanced shop stewards.
Moreover, the strikes were, as Ruiters maintains, profoundly political.92 The shop stewards councils allowed ordinary workers to talk openly about politics for the first time since the early 1960s. For many workers, the struggle in the factories was continuous with the broader struggle for liberation. The councils provided ‘a focus for workers around issues beyond the factory …’93 as workers appealed to township residents for support and mobilised people in trains, hostels, shebeens and churches.
At this stage, the political awakening was not identified with a particular formation but rather, as the Katlehong chair put it, ‘we are not fighting only for a 20c wage increase, but for our rights and for our country.’94 Moreover, the Fosatu unions’ non-racism dovetailed with the ANC tradition and thus boosted the resurgence of the ANC in opposition to the Black Consciousness Movement, particularly through the Congress of South African Students (Cosas) which was strong on the East Rand.95
For migrant workers, the primary awakening came through the experience of power in collective action. As one migrant expressed it: ‘Other workers see that these workers have got for themselves power over management during the strike. They see and they tell themselves that it is this kind of power that can help us to get our rights. This was a challenge to them to do the same, to go on strike to get their own power.’96
Chapter Five
Worker action fans out: 1980–1984
In the early 1980s, Mawu and Naawu spread to all parts of the country. They typically established a presence in a new area by focussing on a large or influential factory where news of struggle spread to neighbouring factories and communities. Often, after these unions targeted a factory, a dispute erupted; the industrial action then served to raise the profile of unionisation in general and in these unions in particular; a cadre of new leaders then emerged who set out to recruit in neighbouring workplaces; once a sufficient number of workplaces were organised, they launched a new branch. In this way the metal unions pioneered expansion for themselves and other Fosatu unions.
Auto expansion
Before the 1980s, the auto industry was based mainly in the Eastern Cape and was dominated by large assembly plants. In 1985, these plants contributed 71 per cent of Naawu’s paid-up membership.1 Largely dependent on auto assembly were the smaller tyre and rubber, and auto component sub-sectors. Tyre and rubber logically fell into auto components but it always remained more strongly linked to the assemblers sector.
Auto was smaller than other sectors in Numsa, in particular engineering. On Numsa‘s formation it had 24 000 members compared to motor’s 40 000 and engineering’s 70 000. Yet it occupied a strategic position in the Eastern Cape and national economy which enabled these workers to wield considerable power in the metal sector.
In the early 1980s, Numarwosa/UAW began to expand into other centres, particularly the northern Transvaal, where manufacturers such as Toyota, Sigma and BMW had moved in a cost-cutting exercise. Previously, auto assemblers had set up plants next to Port Elizabeth’s working harbour where parts were shipped in; now the ‘just in time’ production system pioneered by the Japanese eliminated the use of warehouses to store excess supplies. This meant that components were flown directly to plants when required and it thus became possible for assemblers to relocate factories from harbour cities to the major markets of the Transvaal. Component manufacturers followed suit.2
Workers in BMW factory in Rosslyn: manufacturers such as Toyota, Sigma and BMW moved from Port Elizabeth to the northern Transvaal in a cost-cutting exercise in the early 1980s (Abdul Shariff)
For some Eastern Cape employers, this move to the Transvaal was also prompted by the volatility of labour relations and the sharp rise in wages in the region, whereas Northern Transvaal, by contrast, had an abundance of unorganised, low-wage labour. For Crouch, the mobility of capital is ‘the great weakness of labour … which no amount of organisation can offset. Capital unlike labour can change its form, go away, move to sectors or countries where it can be more profitably employed whilst labour comprises individual human beings who need constant subsistence and can only move to alternative employment and across geographical distances in search of employment with great risk and difficulty.’3 Even labour’s most powerful weapon, the strike, he contends, cannot withstand capital’s resources and mobility. Naawu was, however, fortunate in that capital relocated within the same country and, undaunted, it began to organise the Transvaal plants. The aim, explained Naawu’s Les Kettledas, was twofold: to improve the lot of Transvaal workers and to equalise conditions: ‘We said, listen, you can run wherever you want to, we’ll be there. And that’s how we started organising in the Transvaal so that we could balance everything, raise conditions of employment to about the same level, so that there was no incentive for Eastern Cape people to run to the Transvaal.’
In 1979, the union sent Kettledas, its Eastern Cape secretary, to organise in the Transvaal.4 But conditions were tougher there. There was no industrial council and the mass of African workers were excluded from the official bargaining system. Numarwosa/UAW was forced to fight for recognition and bargaining rights company by company, without the possibility of extending improved conditions to the unorganised through industrial council agreements. Workers had little exposure to unions and there were no experienced coloured unionists, as in the Eastern Cape, to help.
Nevertheless, Africans were ripe for organisation, and within six months Kettledas had recruited substantial membership at Bosal in Koedoespoort, BMW in Rosslyn and Datsun in Pretoria. These formed the basis of a new Naawu branch. Adler was hired in 1981 to set up offices in Pretoria and to be ‘responsible for the Transvaal region’. With a Fosatu organiser from Benoni, Martin Ndaba, he began organising assembly plants, which were massive: ‘… you walk for 30 minutes from one side to the other. The smallest was 600 workers in Brits, and the largest was Volkswagen with 6 000 workers’. The two men also targeted small labour-intensive component factories where workers endured ‘terrible conditions’.