Highveld Steel worker and later Mawu organiser, Frank Boshielo (Numsa)
In 1983, Mawu’s grand plan began to unravel. The National Union of Mineworkers, with access to the mines, quickly picked up 20 000 members.37 Commented Fanaroff: ‘We heard from workers that when Bobby [Godsell, from Anglo American] heard that Mawu was organising the mines he suddenly dropped his opposition to NUM, so we couldn’t get into the plants but the NUM could.’ He also conceded: ‘I’m bad at getting together big groups of people … Cyril [Ramaphosa, then NUM general secretary] put together a big team and hit the ground with a lot of resources and access as … well I don’t like taking risks … and you needed to. He was a very good manager.’ The 1984 split in Mawu also set back its Eastern Transvaal project. Fanaroff recalls that the leader of the breakaway union, David Sebabi, ‘told his homeboys that Moss and I were agents of the state and Moss nearly got killed up there at Driehoek in the chrome mines.’
Compounding this was the ongoing fear of white farmers intent on driving out the union. Fanaroff remembered: ‘Moss and I were convinced that the farmers were going to kill us on the way home at midnight. There’s nothing between Burgersfort and Middelburg and every time we got to Middelburg we’d give a sigh of relief. That road past Roossenekal and out was very lonely, through the mountains.’
Mawu stopped organising in the area, although the Eskom plants remained loyal to it.38 The Eastern Transvaal debacle was a rare case of an unsuccessful and irretrievable outcome.
Expansion into Brits
Roused by news of East Rand upheavals and of union activity around Pretoria, activists in Brits, 50 kilometres from Pretoria, began organising a large factory in their area, B&S. This recognition struggle signalled a new trend in Mawu – the trial of strength.
The trial of strength is regarded as the classic strike although it is the least used form of industrial action as it is highly risky. It involves prolonged action in which employers and strikers suffer huge financial losses which finally drives them to a settlement, and it is usually employed as a weapon of last resort. Comments Richard Hyman: ‘It is normally regarded by all concerned as sufficiently momentous an event to be planned with some care and launched only after intensive efforts at peaceful resolution of the question at issue.’39
At B&S, the ‘momentous’ nature of the showdown was not fully appreciated until workers had spontaneously downed tools. With little preparation on how to fund the strike, workers improvised as it unfolded. Thus the maintenance of strike solidarity for more than a year became critical.
For Crouch, the trial of strength exposes workers to heavy losses. He points out that strikes amongst workers new to unionisation are often long and bitter and caused by employers refusing recognition. He sees this union strategy as an expression of weakness, as by leaving work strikers lose their means of support while the employer has the power to dismiss them and recruit new labour. Workers consume their income almost immediately so their staying power declines rapidly. In contrast, the capitalist with more resources experiences a slower rate of weakening.40
Tarrow believes however that it can be a benefit. ‘For people whose lives are mired in drudgery and desperation, the offer of an exciting, risky, and possibly beneficial campaign of collective action may be a gain.’41 Fantasia takes this further and sees the positive spinoffs of spontaneous militancy, especially at a local level, as ‘the ultimate base of working class power.’42
The B&S strikers were indeed in a weak position, with little prospect of forcing management’s hand. The longer the strike lasted and the more impoverished they and their families became, the more futile the trial of strength tactic appeared. But this is where Crouch’s argument weakens. He fails to place the trial of strength in any context, so its power cannot be assessed. In the B&S case, although the workers had little prospect of finding alternative employment, the strike welded large sections of their communities together. Through union networks, support was elicited from left-leaning white university students and intellectuals, as well as workers elsewhere in the country. Protracted ordeals like the B&S strike taught powerless and poorly educated people lessons in the exercise of power, and ways of using power in future battles.
The Brits industrial area, on the border of the Bophuthatswana homeland, fell under government’s ‘deconcentration’ policy launched in the 1960s. Through a system of incentives including tax breaks and generous wage subsidies, the aim was to create industrial zones, often on homeland borders, to stem the flow of Africans to white cities.43 Union-free and hidden, many of these companies allowed workers’ wages and conditions to fall below survival levels.
Cashing in on the state’s incentive, B&S moved from Johannesburg to Brits in 1969. The business manufactured steel furniture and was making good profits. Its net income after taxation rose steadily, from 6,7 per cent in 1979 to 14,2 per cent in 1981, and it was ranked third in the Sunday Times Top 100 Companies in 1981.44 It employed 900, mainly women workers who commuted long distances from the dry, overcrowded villages and resettlement camps of Bophuthatswana to earn as little as R196 a month. Women were in the lowest wage categories and were paid significantly less than men in the same jobs.45 Workers complained of physical assaults, verbal abuse, searches of their persons and belongings, lack of safety equipment and a complete absence of communication with management.46
Contacted by youthful activists from the Young Christian Workers (YCW) in the area, Mawu began organising B&S in 1982 and soon won over 70 per cent of the workforce. Adler recalled the YCW contribution: ‘Exceptional people who flourish in that small environment [Oukasie, the township neighbouring Brits]. Its leadership was exceptionally strong and deep-rooted and that partly goes back to the early involvement of many of those leaders in YCW which was there before the unions and developed this core of leadership who moved into the unions and politics and the community.’47 Two of the activists, David Modimoeng and Peter Dantjies, were destined to make a large contribution to the union. ‘I came into union matters through the YCW,’ explained Dantjies. ‘There were about seven or eight of us that were selected in Brits. They formed just small leadership groups and we learnt all about trade unions and worker issues through them. There was a Roman Catholic hall in Brits that we used a lot.’48 Dantjies began raising union awareness among workers at the Brits fridge components factory, Femco, which he joined after leaving school. He urged workers not to work until a dismissed colleague was reinstated, and management locked him out. In a subsequent protest strike, Modimoeng was also fired. Factories in Brits blocked their employment and so they became union activists.49
Despite Mawu’s majority in the factory, B&S refused to recognise it and tried to identify union members by recruiting shop stewards as spies. It told workers that they were fools to join the union because it could not pay them and they ‘would not go far with the factory’.50 When this failed, the company sacked the entire shop stewards committee on the pretext that it needed to retrench. The committee was reinstated after a strike, but the company stonewalled recognition. A date was finally set for the discussion of grievances, but a few days beforehand, in September 1982, management fired the Mawu vice-chairman and switched off machines. Workers were told that the factory would be closed for three days, and that all 900 were dismissed and could apply for selective re-employment.51
About 300 Mawu members gathered outside the factory to demand a return to work but they were replaced by those who accepted selective re-employment and unemployed labour from Brits and Bophuthatswana.52 The new workforce was recruited through a labour bureau with ‘the power to discriminate against and blacklist workers’, and it was claimed in a subsequent court case that ‘companies in the area, united through the employers association, influenced the local administration board to prevent union members being employed elsewhere in the Brits industrial complex’.53
Despite