Thozamile Botha, Ford Cortina Struandale worker and Pebco leader (EP Herald)
The Eveready defeat made a deep impression on the emerging unions. It hardened their attitude to the official bargaining system by highlighting that a legal strike did not protect workers from dismissal or police action and that union registration did not guarantee bargaining rights.56 It also underscored the limits to the strategy of organising foreign-owned companies. One useful consequence of the strike, however, was the strengthening of ties between Numarwosa and Tuacc. Tuacc’s Alec Erwin visited Port Elizabeth during the dispute and was impressed. ‘They lost but that had nothing to do with the way they organised it. The strike convinced me we had a lot to learn from them.’57
A series of strikes at Ford in 1979 provided some salutary lessons which forced the union to examine its policy of political independence. The first strike began in October 1979 at the Cortina Struandale Plant when Thozamile Botha, a trainee draughtsman and leader of the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organisation (Pebco), resigned because the company was putting pressure on him over his political activity. Workers distributed pamphlets warning that ‘if he [Botha] is not here at noon today, tools down everybody’. Port Elizabeth was emerging as a centre of African resistance to apartheid, and Botha was addressing rallies of 10 000 people. At noon, 700 African workers gathered on the company’s lawns for Botha to address them. Ford’s personnel officer urged them to return to work and asked UAW’s John Mke to translate. When workers heard their union president talking management language, Mke’s days as a worker leader were over.58
The irony was that UAW supported the workers’ demands; after the strike ended with Botha’s reinstatement, it negotiated full pay for strikers. Countering Pebco’s accusations that it had sold out the workers, Sauls retorted angrily: ‘It was clear to us: Pebco used this to show their control over workers. And they succeeded. They could get all the workers out and keep them out for three days. It was then clear that Botha was not pursuing the interests of the workers. He did not ask the question about the lost pay.’ In a press statement, Numarwosa organiser George Manase restated the union’s policy: ‘We are fighting for the liberation of the black people … we should operate on our area – trade unions – and politicians in theirs. We must work on parallel lines. These militant radicals interfere with us.’59 Other BEC members endorsed his view, while Sauls reaffirmed the need for unions to maintain their political independence.
Women strikers from Eveready in Port Elizabeth receiving food parcels and strike pay of R10 each from Danny Leen (left), organising secretary of the National Union of Motor Assembly and Rubber Workers, in November 1978 (EP Herald)
The leadership of UAW and Numarwosa were not, however, apolitical. They rejected racial divisions and were concerned to build workers’ awareness of themselves as able to overcome exploitation and a sense of inferiority to whites. In the mid-1970s, as they linked up with unions elsewhere, they began to develop education programmes which cast workers as an oppressed class. Their perspective would bring them closer to the leaders of Mawu.
The Pebco stoppage triggered a spate of strikes at Ford in which UAW negotiated on workers’ behalf and when the company fired 700 strikers it demanded reinstatement. At this point the power struggle between UAW and Pebco resurfaced, with a group of dismissed workers electing an independent Pebco committee, later the Ford Workers Committee, to negotiate with management. Eventually, an embarrassed US government intervened and Ford agreed to reinstate the strikers.60
The Ford dispute raised issues for the UAW leaders, who were clearly out of touch with worker militancy. When they told workers that Ford was open to partial reinstatement, they were accused of being sell-outs and likened to hated community councillors.
A few months later, the Ford committee launched the rival Motor Assembly and Component Workers Union of South Africa (Macwusa), committed to fighting for rights in the townships as well as in factories. Over time, Macwusa recruited members in Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage and Pretoria, although it never overtook UAW and Numarwosa membership.61
Some of the 700 Ford workers leaving the Ford Struandale assembly plant after a meeting in November 1979. Management considered workers to have terminated their service (EP Herald: Siphiwe)
WPMawu delegation to Fosatu launch in 1979 (Joe Foster front left) (Wits archives)
The Ford disputes forced the UAW to examine its organising strategy. It concluded that organisers and factory representatives did not meet members often enough and that it had failed to build strong factory structures, allowing militants to view it as a management–government puppet. The weakness of the liaison committee strategy was also brought into strong relief. The union responded by strengthening shop steward structures and renegotiating grievance procedures to ensure that workers had a voice, and the upshot was the signing of an unusually sophisticated agreement in which Ford agreed to full-time shop stewards on full pay – a precedent soon followed by VW.62
The strikes signalled that workers would inevitably turn their newfound confidence and factory power to the voicing of wider political grievances. They also alerted other employers to the danger of dealing with ineffective worker structures. Among other workers in the Eastern Cape, and elsewhere in South Africa, these workers’ militancy and victories were watched with keen interest.63
At the time that Numarwosa was breaking out of the Tucsa mould, another coloured union, the Western Province Motor Assemblers Union (WPMawu) was challenging Tucsa’s leadership. Formed in Cape Town in 1961 by coloured workers, it soon won recognition at Austen Motors, Chrysler and British Leyland. Natie Gantana, a Leyland worker and president of WPMawu, recalled that at this stage the union ‘had a sad history because it had a sad executive. It was recognised by law and the company but it didn’t operate in the workers’ interests … The leaders were management guys – they didn’t want to put up a hard fight … The shop stewards were senior blokes, inspectors and charge hands, and the blue overall guys never qualified to be shop stewards.’64
A persistent worker grievance was that union leaders negotiated better pay rises for higher grades at Leyland, including themselves. A small group of union activists campaigned house to house and at a general meeting members passed a motion of no confidence in the executive. They formed an interim executive committee, suspended a proposed merger with UAW, and voted out the old executive in 1972.65
In the same year, Joe Foster, a printworker, was appointed national secretary (Tucsa’s secretaries were not elected) and began restoring worker control through accountable shop stewards. Foster commented: ‘We believe very strongly in participatory democracy, in grassroots democracy. We, the executive and officials, could run the union efficiently like a business if we wanted to … but we don’t think things should run that way. We believe that a future democratic South Africa should be run by the people, that the workers should participate in the running of the country.’66
WPMawu broke with Tucsa in 1972 and tried to convince Numarwosa to do likewise,67 but the latter followed only four years later. Sauls recalls why it left:
When we started looking at our relationship with UAW and the direction in which the union was going our affiliation to Tucsa and the IMF [International Metalworkers Federation] became important issues.68 In our discussions the question arose that if the UAW does not fit into Tucsa there must be something drastically wrong with that organisation. We had discussions with Tucsa unions at annual conferences to see how they viewed the bringing in of African workers into the