Читать книгу Metal that Will not Bend - Kally Forrest - Страница 12

Any trade union wishing to alter the conditions of its members will have to address the question of growth and numbers. For unions, whose primary membership comprises highly replaceable semi-skilled and unskilled workers, the question of growth is pivotal because they cannot rely on the scarcity of their members’ skills as a bargaining weapon.

In order to advance workers’ interests it is necessary for unions to challenge both management control and the power of the state. The only weapon they have in this uneven contest is the wielding of power in order to secure a hearing and, at times, to force the hand of powerful forces in opposition to their interests. If unions represent a sizeable proportion of their constituency who are vociferous in their own interests it becomes difficult for organs of power to ignore them.

The acquisition of power is not simply a question of numbers – strategic selection of companies; the strength of workplace structures; the strength of internal organisational cohesion; the unity of membership’s goals; the strategic use of conflict; and the overall strategies and policies the union adopts will all affect its access to power. Yet without numbers to champion these strategic visions there can be no implementation of demands. Union growth in itself is multifaceted, governed by economic, social, political and organisational factors which embrace questions of leadership, union structure, unity, mergers, alliances, legal reforms and so on.

Growth posed a dilemma for the emerging metal unions, and especially for Mawu. As a survival strategy it had opted to build power in selected factories and thereby concentrate its resources, but the challenge now was how to grow rapidly and build industrial power without losing organisational coherence.

As the 1980s dawned, unions faced a new constraint on growth: the economy was entering one of its longest and deepest downswings. The immediate trigger was a world recession precipitated by the 1979 revolution in Iran and a huge jump in the oil price. By 1981 the gold price was also falling, and by 1982 the economy was registering negative growth.¹ Owing to structural weaknesses, including stagnant consumer markets, a reliance on primary goods in a shrinking world market and an internationally uncompetitive manufacturing sector, the economy failed to bounce back when global conditions improved. A debt crisis was aggravated by massive government spending on apartheid and, as township unrest mounted, its security apparatus. From the mid-1980s, political risk prompted disinvestment by foreign capital and a credit freeze by foreign banks. Also, between 1982 and 1986, agriculture was smitten by a terrible drought.²

In a bid to improve the balance of payments, the government hiked interest rates, which hit small firms already under pressure from soaring fuel and electricity costs. From the early to mid-1980s, up to sixteen companies a day were folding, and survivors found their profit margins slashed. An estimated 1,5 million new workers entered the market at a time when only 150 000 new jobs were created (while 185 000 jobs were created in the public sector, around 30 000 jobs were lost in the private sector).³

The response of business to declining profits was to cut costs by mechanising and reorganising production – which destroyed thousands of low-skilled jobs in the metal industry. Retrenchments sapped the unions’ factory base and exposed members and shop stewards to victimisation. Commented a Mawu organiser: ‘Many factories are trying to get rid of union members … they say there is no work. Also they will say this guy has skills – he has a special job and we can’t retrench him. And the workers know it is only because he is not a member of the union.’⁴ Some employers slashed labour costs by retrenching their entire workforce and moving to government-subsidised ‘deconcentration zones’ in the homelands.

The state provided almost no protection from the ravages of unemployment except for a short-term, minuscule payout from the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) to workers with urban residence rights. Employers saw the massive haemorrhage of jobs as a straightforward economic and market issue. One employer spoke for many: ‘No negotiation at all over retrenchments. That’s a purely financial matter and purely up to management.’ Indeed, a 1983 management conference welcomed the job losses: ‘Retrenchments had a positive effect on company-worker relations; workers are now a little more worried about their jobs, and productivity has improved a lot because they know what can happen to them as well.’⁵ Many employers were so detached from the lives of their employees that they failed to inform retrenchment victims of unemployment benefits or sign off their UIF cards.

A 1984 survey on the East Rand showed that even employers who agreed to retrenchment procedures generally did not follow them. They gave little or no notice. The TMF foundry, for example, informed workers on the morning they were laid off, and then locked them out when they protested. One worker relates:

I arrived on Monday afternoon for the night shift. I looked at the clock station for my clock card, it was not there. We stood outside because we didn’t have the tickets and waited for boss Willen … there were eight from my department … he came to his office, went in, and came out to say there is no more job for us. I asked him how can he dismiss me like that, I have worked since 1970. He said he can’t do nothing, there is no job … I went to George to complain about the retrenchment and he said I did not work well and that I became drunk. He did not want me to answer and then he just walked out.⁶

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.