By mid–1982, unions were well known in northern Natal, but the spark for a union conquest of the area was a bitter strike at Alusaf in July 1982.26 In the wake of nationwide strikes by workers demanding the withdrawal of their pension contributions, Alusaf workers asked to withdraw from the Metal Industries Group Pension Fund (MIGPF) (the fund allowed workers to claim their pensions, often their only savings, after the age of 65). The workers’ aim was to set up a new fund governed by worker-negotiated rules. Alusaf delayed taking up the demand with the metal industrial council, to which Mawu did not belong. Shop stewards approached management while 1 700 workers from various shifts milled around the canteen, tensely waiting for a report back. Nala explains what happened next:
Alusaf had long concrete walls. The police, commandos, soldiers pinned them up against concrete walls, beat the hell out of them. Some guys had eight stitches. Workers forced the concrete wall to collapse for them to get out of there. People knew the people, they worked with supervisors, they were very reluctant to go back and work with them. We couldn’t talk sense into that strike because I think what happened had never happened anywhere. Being beaten into a strike is rather different than going out on strike. People were at hospitals, in the shrubs. Richards Bay is built on water. There were people who fell into the swamps and were collected there by ambulances … it was really, really horrific. And workers were angry. The strike went on for a month.
In the first week all workers were fired. The strike they were ‘beaten into’ almost triggered a general strike in the area, especially as other workers had downed tools at Richards Bay Coal Terminal and Triomf, over similar grievances.27 Workers at Grinaker and Fraser Chalmers mounted short solidarity stoppages after hearing that 12 workers had been hospitalised and 16 arrested, and that Alusaf management had asked their employers to supply replacement staff. An area-wide strike committee of representatives from communities and factories was elected to coordinate the response to the disputes. When police banned meetings in Esikhawini, where most Alusaf workers lived, the committee mounted a stay-away.28 Transport & General Workers Union bus drivers refused to transport passengers to work, while members of Fosatu’s food affiliate in pineapple canning factories and sugar mills extended their lunch hours and staged weekly protest stoppages.29
As other employers pressed Alusaf to settle, the company abruptly capitulated and sacked its managing director. It agreed to present Mawu’s proposal to the industrial council and it undertook to set up a provident fund. With company executives, Nala travelled to the Seifsa offices in Johannesburg to reclaim workers’ pension money. ‘I drove back from Johannesburg; if anyone had known, I must have had millions of rands in my car, cheques.’ Hundreds of workers were waiting outside the union offices for their cheques worth up to R20 000. ‘We had such a braai. Everyone came and ate!’
The Alusaf strike highlighted what Fanaroff called the union’s ‘opportunism’ – its ability to seize the moment. It mobilised thousands of northern Natal workers. Vilane, who became Fosatu’s regional chair, recalled how it helped to open up areas beyond Richards Bay, including Isithebe in the nearby KwaZulu homeland‘s deconcentration zone. Politically, too, the stay-away exposed workers and township residents to the power of community/worker solidarity.
Eastern Transvaal setback
Just as Alusaf opened up northern Natal, Highveld Steel and Vanadium Corporation was the catalyst for expansion in the Eastern Transvaal, particularly the Witbank-Middelburg industrial complex.
In 1981, Mawu developed the notion, driven by Fanaroff, that the way to grow the union’s power and to build socialism was to take control of the coalfields and the power stations in the Eastern Transvaal in order to ultimately cripple the economy. He explained: ‘If you’re looking for a power base to start to put pressure on the apartheid government, you control all the electricity generation then you’re certainly in a good bargaining position … we were going to seize power by organising the coal mines, and the power stations and steel plants, and that would be the heart of the economy.’
The long-standing management strategy at Eskom and Iscor had been to break the power of white unions and shift to low-wage black labour. To this end, Iscor withdrew from the engineering industrial council during the Second World War and set up its own bargaining forum.30 In the post-war period, a decentralisation strategy was adopted to insulate power and steel workers from the influence of the strike-prone Rand. After 1955, Eskom power stations were built in the coalfields of the Eastern Transvaal, and Iscor moved to Vereeniging. They were serviced by labour from the African reserves.31
In the early 1980s, Mawu’s first target was Highveld Steel, Witbanks’s largest employer. A group of liaison committee members made contact with Mawu and David Sebabi was sent to organise. Highveld Steel worker and later Mawu and Numsa organiser Frank Boshielo recalls that the only union recruiting Africans at Highveld was a black parallel of SABS: ‘I was assigned by two other guys to go and look for a union and we didn’t know where to go. We saw Mawu in the newspaper, especially in Durban, so we phoned the Mawu head office in Durban. Then we met someone who was working for Textile [Fosatu affiliate] and he connected us with Mawu in Benoni and we met the branch secretary.’32
As at VW, a group of mainly clerical workers with greater mobility established a network of activists. Union education and recruitment took place chiefly in Highveld’s hostels, and Boshielo’s hostel room became a contact-point. By the end of 1982, Mawu had recruited the majority of black workers. Arbitrary dismissals were a prominent grievance, and the union first won credibility by demanding dismissal and grievance procedures. After initially refusing union recognition on the grounds that Mawu was not party to the industrial council, the company signed an agreement in 1983.33
Highveld Steel’s activist shop stewards soon fanned out to other parts of the Eastern Transvaal. Steel and Alloys workers in adjacent Middelburg heard of developments at Highveld and sought out Boshielo. Said one shop steward:
Strike ballot at Highveld Steel in 1984 (Bernie Fanaroff)
Steel and Alloys was seriously resisting the union … what surprised me was that people were hired this week and next week they were all fired. I complained once … they thought I was a troublemaker and so they wanted to co-opt me on to the liaison committee and when I arrived there was a small cake and cool drinks and choice assorted biscuits once you finished your cake … then SABS was introduced into the company but I didn’t join and I saw that SABS treated blacks different from whites, and in their meetings was also a big cake and biscuits, and dismissals went on. Then we decided to find a militant union.34
The steward described how, when Boshielo visited the hostel, he was besieged by questioning workers whose chief anxiety was the danger of being fired if they signed up. The company initially insisted that the union recruit ‘50 per cent plus one’ of its 4 000 workforce, but eventually granted recognition when the union had enrolled 1 800 members. The word even spread into remote areas. An organising drive at a Highveld Steel colliery in Roossenekal sparked an approach in 1982 from workers at American-owned Tubatse Ferrochrome in Lebowa, and Mawu used this as a bridgehead to organise Anglo American mines in the area.35
At the same time, the union began organising Eskom power plants, first in Germiston and then, through the efforts of Highveld Steel workers, in the Eastern Transvaal. Many plants were situated near ‘tied mines’ which fed coal directly into generators. If the union wanted to control