Mandlenkosi Makhoba recalled the desperation of unemployment:
And when you are out of a job, you realise that the boss and the government have the power to condemn you to death. If they send you back home, and back home now there’s a drought, and you can’t get any new job, it’s a death sentence. The countryside is pushing you into the cities to stay alive; the cities are pushing you into the countryside to die. You get scared. It’s a fear that you come to know after a week without food.7
Most companies did not discuss job cuts or negotiate severance pay as a strategy to prevent workers from taking action against the closure. Unskilled contract workers were the worst hit, even if they had sufficient education to be trained or retrained. Eddie Webster’s survey of union members who were predominantly migrants showed that 60 per cent had at least primary schooling.8 It was unskilled contract workers who were most affected by retrenchments. From the 1980s, in line with the Riekert Commission’s call for the creation of a stable class of black urban ‘insiders’; administration boards urged employers to hire local labour and discouraged the recruitment of illegal migrants.9 The recession provided an ideal setting for pursuing this policy.
Union leadership began changing with the shift in the workforce. University of the Witwatersrand academic and Fosatu educator Philip Bonner commented: ‘We could see students whose education ended with the Soweto uprising coming into factories Younger urban militants began to move into leadership … More and more factories were becoming less migrant. Above all, shop stewards, and particularly branch leadership, were more dominated by educated younger people.’10 It was urbanised African workers who were beginning to benefit from the union’s organising efforts, while thousands of migrants were condemned to unemployment in the poverty-stricken homelands.
Georgina Jaffee’s 1984 survey of migrants retrenched by Dunswart Iron and Steel provides a picture of their fate. After a landmark court challenge by Mawu, the company paid each of the workers R500. But drought hampered small farming in rural KwaZulu-Natal, and many workers failed to claim unemployment benefits because of bureaucratic obstacles and the cost of travelling to state pay-points. Their children began to starve and some were sent away to grandparents. Within four months, the men had either eaten or sold their livestock, and were sending desperate messages to Dunswart workers for help.11
For those who held onto jobs, wages were eroded by rising prices and taxes after 1983, while overtime fell by 40 per cent.12 By 1982, rising inflation had increased bread prices by 40 per cent, house rentals by 30 per cent, and hostel rents by 70 per cent.13 The introduction of Value Added Tax on all goods and foodstuffs, also hit workers’ pockets. Most managers worked on the assumption that workers were paid as individuals, but surveys in Soweto in 1983 showed that half of the households sent money to dependents elsewhere, usually to bantustans.14
Dunswart Iron and Steel in Benoni was organised by Mawu in the 1970s but was hit hard by the recession and retrenchments in the early 1980s (W Matlala)
Members of the metal unions were hard hit by this recession, for car sales slumped from a high of 32 500 in 1983 to a ten-year low of 12 500 in 1986,15 and, countrywide, more than 35 000 workers in the auto and motor retail sectors lost jobs.16 World recession also had a dramatic impact on the metal engineering sector where 76 000 workers lost jobs between 1982 and 1986 and output fell by 11 per cent.17
Yet in defiance of unionisation patterns elsewhere in the world, the metal unions entered a phase of unprecedented growth and labour militancy and their careful groundwork in the 1970s began to pay dividends.
Workers turned to the militant new unions out of desperation, but this was not the only reason. Addressing a later period in the 1980s, Ian Macun writes that ‘the connections between union growth and political activity is [sic] more tenuous than assumed’.18 He shows that the change in membership density was not marked with heightened political activity such as the repression in 1986 or the unbanning of political parties in 1990. He makes the important point that union growth was directly affected by micro political opportunities that were opened up on the factory floor. One of the attractions of the emerging unions was their role in giving black workers a voice, which apartheid denied them. For the metal workers of the East Rand, many of them migrants, union organisation brought a measure of control over the insecurity of their working lives threatened by job cuts and the whims of white foremen.
Mawu and migrant workers
Unlike workers in the Eastern Cape auto industry, those on the East Rand were mainly migrants. At Ford, for example, all African workers had Section 10 rights (under Section 10 of the Urban Bantu Areas Act, Africans could obtain rights to live in the city if they had worked in one company for ten unbroken years) and the Port Elizabeth branch of the National Automobile and Allied Workers’ Union (Naawu) had no migrant members. In comparison, Mawu members on the East Rand had much less bargaining power. As a Transvaal organiser of Naawu, Taffy Adler, noted:
Component worker operating a moulding machine (Lesley Lawson)
In the Transvaal both Mawu and Naawu [Numarwosa’s successor] organised African workers but in Mawu it was often migrant based. Motor workers in Naawu were generally urban based … people who lived in Brits and the homelands who would commute for a couple of hours a day [from places] like Soshanguve and rural townships in Bop [Bophuthatswana], Mamelodi, Atteridgeville.
Originally in Mawu we organised the big steel processing plants – this is a different type of person from the person who works in the electronic industry. In the early days of Mawu we were organising in foundries and workers there were poorly educated, low paid, migrants. In components, workers were urban (out of Pretoria townships) less educated and sophisticated than in the assembly plants but not as badly off as people in the foundries.19
The increase in black semi-skilled operatives opened the way for huge growth in African unionism, especially in the metal sector. In the early days, migrants doing manual work in heavy engineering formed the core of Mawu’s membership; they were later complemented by semi-skilled operators who joined factories in large numbers. Such workers, although not as strategically positioned as the Eastern Cape auto workers, nevertheless possessed a bargaining power which unskilled workers lacked.
It was these semi-skilled and unskilled migrant workers who became the backbone of Mawu. In the beginning, few of the new African urban workers joined unions such as Mawu. Most who joined had roots in the Transvaal and Natal countryside. According to Mawu’s Fanaroff:
Almost all workers were migrant workers, that was characteristic of the union in the early days. Some, as at Kraft Engineering, lived in Alexandra or Soweto but all of them saw themselves as temporary in the towns … even when they had lived all their lives in the towns. Like these guys Isaac Modise and Ledwaba. Their ambition was to get enough money to buy a few cattle and then go back to Northern Transvaal. People felt they were here to provide for their families and they wanted to go back home. All people at that time were migrants in heavy engineering.20
Typically, migrants were driven from their villages by drought and the exhausted soil of the reserves. Recruited by the local labour bureau for a particular company, they were placed in jobs without training and would learn by imitating other workers. Only the most resilient survived; the ‘cheeky’ and ‘slow’ were quickly weeded out.21 Migrants entered annual contracts and travelled home at Christmas for two weeks before renewing them, often with the same company. Hours were long and the jobs badly paid and repetitive, often involving overtime and Saturday work.
Hostel with rudimentary