Union expansion took different forms but it was seldom a strategised executive decision. A decision to organise a new area was usually a response to an approach by workers in areas such as Brits, Witbank and Richards Bay. The strategy was to focus on organising the largest and most influential factory and, as engineering firms were often the largest employers in an area, Naawu and Mawu frequently pioneered the unionisation of new industrial zones. Recruitment drives across a new zone had the added advantage of allowing for solidarity action in disputes from other Fosatu members.
Organising drives into new areas eroded important apartheid constructs. Mawu attacked the divisive bantustan system and its associated ‘deconcentrated’ industrial areas where the state sought to establish industrial bases in impoverished ethnic homelands which would provide employment and legitimise its divide and rule strategy. In this way it hoped to divest itself of the responsibility for these overpopulated areas whilst ensuring that a plentiful supply of cheap labour was available to the rest of South Africa.
Expansion into northern Natal
Union struggles in rural towns such as Richards Bay and Brits took on a distinct character because although workers were extremely vulnerable, they could draw on the support of small, cohesive communities.
In northern Natal, Mawu used an innovative organisational combination. It continued to put shop stewards and their training at the centre of organisation but it followed a form of general unionism in which community meetings played an important role in winning shop floor rights.
June-Rose Nala (now Hartley), a Mawu general secretary and later northern Natal branch secretary, commented on workers’ high levels of self-sufficiency and initiative in driving organisation in Richards Bay. As Nala was the only Fosatu organiser in the area, the strategy made good sense. She was sent to Richards Bay by the Mawu executive in 1981, and she immediately focused on training factory leaders and building efficient administrative systems in the branch office. After basic input, workers took over the organisation of individual factories.17 The aim was to unionise the whole area, as a worker at the Alusaf aluminium smelter, Jeffrey Vilane recalls: ‘It is not enough within Richards Bay to be just one company. There was Triomf. As soon as they came we started organising them, and then we started also organising others. At that time there was a general union that was taking every worker until they were strong in the factory and then we put them into their union. Our goal was to shift the whole of Richards Bay.’18
Fosatu workers at a rally six months after the launch of the Northern Natal branch (Wits archives)
Nala did not enter virgin territory as there had been pockets of union activity in Richards Bay since the early 1970s. In 1972, non-union workers at Alusaf had struck over wages, and a year later they joined the newly launched Mawu. The company, however, insisted that worker-management dealings should be conducted through a liaison committee. In May 1980 workers at a number of Richards Bay factories, including Alusaf, approached Fosatu for organising assistance, and Mawu elected to launch a northern Natal branch.19 Mawu’s decision embraced the expansion of Fosatu to the Richards Bay/Empangeni area where other affiliates had also started organising. In November 1980, 350 workers launched the Mawu office and branch.20 Nala had previously visited the area as part of a Fosatu delegation and now, in 1981, she returned as northern Natal branch secretary to be met with ‘a lot of willingness and excitement that we’d come.’
Alusaf was the obvious organising platform, but management’s response was to invite SABS, affiliated to Tusca, to recruit its African employees. Workers, however, were keen to join Mawu and in less than a year, 365 of Alusaf’s 1 100 workforce had joined.21 After shop stewards demanded recognition, management agreed to meet the union, grant stop-order facilities and consult stewards. A shop steward described workers’ response:
There was a big change in their attitudes … every worker is united, not fighting each other. They sing freedom songs … they are now used to attending meetings … everyone will sit and listen to the meeting and ask good questions … They’re learning their own power. If there’s something happening in another department, they used to feel this is none of my business. But now they know … they must care, because in future it’s coming to him.’22
Alusaf operated as a launching pad ‘to shift the whole of Richards Bay’. Every factory in Richards Bay became a target, and the painstaking factory-by-factory consolidation which marked earlier organisation in southern Natal in areas such as New Germany, Pinetown, Mobeni, and Jacobs was abandoned. Alusaf leaders began recruiting through large meetings of workers from factories in the adjacent townships of Esikhawini and Nseleni, recalling the methods adopted on the East Rand in 1980. Alusaf shop stewards would have been aware of this recruitment tactic through visits from East Rand shop stewards such as Rodney Mwambo, from a Benoni factory, who had joined a Fosatu organising team at Richards Bay during his July leave in 1980. At rallies, the federation, its unions and their structures were introduced and workers agreed that union structures should replace liaison committees.23
Some at the Fosatu head office viewed the general union strategy with suspicion.24 But the national union upsurge and a more permissive climate brought by the East Rand strikes allowed Nala to plot her own course.
In northern Natal Mawu’s role was to recruit wherever a sufficient number of workers from any sector showed interest. After Alusaf, there was no strategic targeting of factories. The guiding principle became ‘the organised must organise the unorganised’.25 Workers at Triomf, Huletts sugar mill, Richards Bay Coal Terminal and Sappi paper mill were signed up and directed to the appropriate Fosatu affiliate. When Mawu had recruited sufficient numbers in a particular sector, it contacted the appropriate union’s general secretary and recommended the deployment of an organiser. However, most Fosatu unions delayed moving into northern Natal, partly, Nala believes, because the federation did not attach importance to far flung rural areas. In Mawu, too, she experienced a lack of support which she ascribed to her difficult relationship with the union’s white male intellectuals:
I was lucky to move up to Richards Bay getting independent space. There was always a thing about white officials who knew everything. If you think you are developing a person you think you can hold the person there but people naturally take off and want their own space …
A lot of issues were not big political differences. They were really about union control … if you talk about democracy let’s have democracy. When I saw the way people were manipulated I used to get really kind of sick. The whole inferiority thing, the complex between black and white is critical … underlying it is inferiority … maybe they were intellectuals, maybe we were relying on them for information and so on. There was tension, especially towards the end with me because I was constantly thinking why is it like this? When are we going to learn that we are equals? At the same time they (white intellectuals) had a place in the organisation. They had talents, they had abilities which we don’t have.
Nala speaking at a Fosatu rally in Northern Natal in 1980, behind her stands Erwin (Wits archives)
Despite these complexities, Nala ultimately emerged as an autonomous worker intellectual who stood in creative tension with white intellectuals in Mawu and Fosatu.
According to Nala; members and their stewards ‘owned the union’. She contrasted this state with that in southern Natal where factories were scattered and employed workers from a wide range of communities – in southern Natal, she argued, union officials created a dependency by transporting workers and convening meetings. In northern Natal, shop stewards set up meetings, arranged venues and hired vehicles. ‘Workers at Alusaf were fantastic, they used to whip around, everyone donates. They gave freely and continually. It was very important to them knowing