Initially, Numarwosa wanted to organise Africans out of a concern for their impoverishment and because it believed racial divisions sapped worker power. Also at issue, however, was the union’s weakness on the industrial council, as Sauls explains:
We had representation on the industrial council although it was not effective. We realised that just having coloureds there to represent coloured interests is not going to effectively challenge management. So, we developed links with African workers in the plants. On the industrial council, management saw two groups of black workers – the coloureds represented by the national union on the one side, and the Africans represented by the Bantu Labour Office on the other. We did not feel satisfied just speaking for the Africans with them having no voice … to improve the conditions of workers, we needed a unified structure.46
Numarwosa first decided to approach Africans in late 1972, while it was still in Tucsa. To circumvent the law, it used the tactical device of forming UAW as a parallel to the white and coloured unions which were covered by industrial relations laws, but with amalgamation into one union as the long-term aim. In Tucsa, parallel coloured and African union leaders were appointed by the white union executive and they were neither developed nor encouraged as trade unionists. In a break from this practice, UAW’s members elected leaders to an independent executive and sat with Numarwosa on a joint advisory committee.47 It is not often acknowledged that the independent UTP (Urban Training Project) associated with Tucsa also played a role in UAW’s early formation. Numarwosa and UTP assisted in the launch of UAW, and in 1975 UTP helped to establish a Pretoria branch and trained Dorah Nowatha to become an organiser. A UTP organiser, Michael Faya, became UAW’s first national secretary in 1974.48
UAW struggled to survive in its early years and organising Africans was a slow and secretive business. Workers were fearful, and union resources meagre. Yet beneath Africans’ cautious facade lay long-standing grievances, particularly around racial discrimination and unfair dismissal. The foremen’s sweeping powers included granting leave, giving permission to use toilets and decisions on wage increases, retrenchments and dismissals. An industrial relations director at General Motors joked: ‘The biggest optimist in the workforce was the guy who brought his sandwiches to work, because he had no assurance that he’d still be there at lunch time.’49 Formal complaints and appeal procedures were unheard of.
In some factories, including Volkswagen, former ANC, PAC and Sactu activists played a crucial organising role. Vuyo Kwinana and Themba Dyassi, for example, were members of an ANC underground cell and had served prison sentences. Elijah ‘Scoma’ Antonie had attended ANC and Sactu lectures, whilst Albert Gomomo was a PAC member who recruited his younger brother, John Gomomo, into the union. The recruiting drive in Uitenhage was an important venture into nonracial organising and shop floor control, as these activists, helped by Numarwosa, built secret cells across departments. Scoma and Papa Williams, Numarwosa’s president and a strong advocate of African membership, were rugby playing friends and worked in the same department. They and others developed a similar position to Mawu’s on political independence. Recalls Scoma: ‘If the ANC is banned, it stands to reason Sactu is also going to be banned. Now in order to avoid that, we did not want to align ourselves with ANC directly. We wanted to be an independent body.’50 This policy had the added advantage of attracting activists from different political groupings and nonpolitical workers.
These unionists used the tactic of taking over statutory liaison committees. Unlike the Tuacc unions, Numarwosa had no political objection to them. Often, liaison committee members were drawn from clandestine factory BECs. From 1973, Numarwosa shop stewards and liaison committee members began meeting regularly to ensure that the committee did not undermine the union’s industrial council negotiations.51
At Volkswagen (VW), union activists used the liaison committee to organise Africans into UAW and to win company recognition, and the close cooperation between coloured Numarwosa leaders and African factory activists made it easier to promote UAW to management. This powerful unity of coloured and African leaders was, however, not a feature of other auto factories. At Ford, for example, coloureds were employed at the Neave plant and African workers at the Cortina and Struandale plants.52
In the components sector, the liaison committee strategy was also used. Daniel Dube, a worker at SKF Bearings in Uitenhage and later Numsa president, recounted how UAW president John Mke and Numarwosa’s Sauls joined forces to gain recognition at SKF, a Swedish subsidiary, in 1976. Meeting resistance, they recruited liaison committee members and, after winning their support, used them as recruiters. Supported by a Swedish union which put pressure on the parent company, they succeeded in winning recognition in May 1977. Dube remembers this as a significant breakthrough, as SKF shop stewards rapidly recruited members in other Uitenhage component factories, including Dorbyl, Borg-Warner, Bosal and National Standard. Port Elizabeth followed suit, with recruiting gains at Willard Batteries, Autoplastics and Dorbyl. Uitenhage shop stewards also helped other emerging unions, including the NUTW and the Sweet Food and Allied Workers Union (SFAWU).53
John Gomomo, a recruiter for UAW and later a Numsa office bearer and Cosatu president (W Matlala)
By the end of 1979, UAW had significant membership at six Port Elizabeth factories and had won recognition at VW, SKF, Ford and General Motors, including stop-order facilities. It had become the first genuinely national union in the new union movement, with branches in Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage, Durban and East London and a presence in large plants in Pretoria.54
One of Numarwosa/UAW’s critical contributions was the building of strong black leadership for the new union movement. Much of it was developed in day to day factory struggles and by the end of the 1970s it was managing large-scale industrial action. Sauls recalls the impact of unionisation in the Eastern Cape by the early 1980s:
They [trade unions] have had a tremendous impact on the area. Companies are multinationals but I can say their attitudes have definitely changed. What is important to me is that people around Uitenhage and PE have really been made aware of the role of trade unionism … during the strike at VW [in 1980], the church people, without our approaching them, have sent circulars to some of the churches telling them that they must address themselves to the conditions under which their congregations are living and working. First it was the Eveready strike, then it was Ford, now it’s the strike at VW. Since then, a lot of people are sitting up. We’ve at least reached the stage where the balance of power across the negotiating table is more or less equal: we don’t have to beg or plead any more. They [workers] realise where the power is: it’s not across the negotiating table. The power is in the capital of management and in the labour power of workers on the floor.
The 1978 strike at British battery manufacturer Eveready was the first legal strike in South Africa for twenty years. Numarwosa’s 320 members, mostly coloured women, struck to demand recognition. Gloria Barry, a former Eveready worker and later vice-president of Numarwosa, recalls that ‘the conditions that these women worked under in Eveready were very bad … once the production lines started, they couldn’t leave to go to the toilet! There were boxes put down and they had to relieve themselves on the line.’55