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There is a relationship between union growth and union structure. The Fosatu unions’ decision to organise as industrial unions, rather than as closed unions like Micwu which ‘are generally orientated to controlling the supply of labour and do so by focussing on entry barriers to jobs and union membership’,⁵³ allowed for inclusion and maximum participation – which attracted Africans who were voiceless. Therefore it was the open industrial unions which grew most rapidly in the 1980s, and which targeted African workers whose skills were easily replaceable.

At the heart of this open unionism were the structures and principles laid down in the 1970s. In this period of rapid expansion, Mawu and Naawu faced the problem of maintaining internal cohesion and ensuring that members were properly serviced.

Crucial to this were strong democratic worker structures which allowed for the stabilisation of organisation and empowered members after recruitment. At the centre lay the shop stewards’ committee, as a Mawu booklet described it:

Each factory must be a school for democracy. The leaders are a voice in the factory: the workers are the union. The shop stewards are our leaders. And workers through their shop stewards must control the union. Leadership does not stop at the factory floor. It extends to the entire organisation. Trade union branches are controlled by a branch executive committee of shop stewards; our union as a whole by a national committee of shop stewards.⁵⁴

As elected representatives, stewards serviced membership in multiple ways, but without workers’ trust they could not survive. A Toyota worker described Mayekiso as having a lot of support on the factory floor. ‘The workers, they trusted Moss because of the way he acted. He showed that he was for the workers.’⁵⁵ Being trustworthy meant being fearless and having broadly acceptable political views. Richard Ntuli, a Mawu shop steward of the early 1980s, believed stewards had to be able to ‘talk to a crowd well and I could do that. I hated this thing of apartheid and workers knew this, I told them this. Also I was not afraid to take things to management that workers asked me to take and to come and report back what management said.’⁵⁶ Members removed stewards if they thought management had subverted them; a foundry strike in 1981 revolved around the demand for the removal of a steward because workers believed he had become an ‘impimpi’ (management spy).⁵⁷

Mercedes Benz shop steward Mtutuzeli Tom (Abdul Shariff)

A key task of shop stewards was to establish a working relationship with management and take up workers’ day-to-day grievances. Mtutuzeli Tom, a Naawu steward at Mercedes Benz and later Numsa president, described the range of grievances shop stewards handled:

The majority were about favouritism. Supervisors would upgrade guys because they were good at giving information about troublemakers. In those days you used to get promotion because you gave things to management, not because of your qualities, expertise. Also racism. We used to have right-wing supervisors using words like ‘kaffirs’, ‘baboons’.

The other common grievance was theft accusations. Sometimes things were put into workers’ lockers to try and get rid of those workers because they were a problem. Also issues around damage on the production line. We make cars. You fix your car and you let it go and then it goes to the next station and it’s scratched. The worker at the next station is accused of damage to company property.

Dismissals because workers were under the influence was [sic] very common, because of the frustrations that workers were experiencing. It’s not so common now. In olden days, workers were forced to work overtime. If they refused: ‘Listen here, there are thousands outside the gates, if you don’t want to work take your jackets and fuck off.’⁵⁸

Stewards often struggled to build a relationship with management, as former Naawu organiser Les Kettledas relates:

The concept of the shop steward was still not understood. I can recall when Naawu organised at CDA, which is now Mercedes Benz, when we went to negotiate for shop stewards, the MD said: ‘Shop stewards? What are shop stewards?’ We said: ‘No, those are people that are elected by other workers to represent them when they have problems.’ He says: ‘Problems? Workers with problems don’t work in this factory!’⁵⁹

Shop stewards also conveyed union policy decisions to members and educated them about their rights. They had to ‘work out how to present the ideology in simple terms and readable terms … linked to what they were doing practically on the factory floor’, Mayekiso recalls.⁶⁰ Part of educating workers involved offering them the rare opportunity to express their ideas and feelings about workplace oppression. Mbuyi Ngwenda, a former Numsa general secretary, recalled his experience as a new member:

I was most impressed by the way the shop stewards conducted meetings where every individual had time to express their views. Even where there were different views the chair would encourage discussions and he’d say ‘everybody has the right to talk’. And I learnt from talking to co-workers, and I had the privilege of talking to a shop steward and president of Numsa, Daniel Dube, who explained the structure of the union and the concepts of accountability and mandate. He was an independent thinker I learned that you must respect different cultures in a union, that some of our members can’t understand English or Afrikaans. Also I learnt that after meetings you must go out of your way to talk to workers who speak louder behind their machines – that’s how you really get to know the feelings of workers.⁶¹

Shop stewards committees were the union’s mobilising force, and were entrenched in the constitution of Fosatu affiliates. By 1980, these structures were fully empowered, and on the East Rand officials no longer controlled the union. As Friedman remarks: ‘The shop steward meetings of 1981 were different: officials attended them, but said little.’⁶²

The development of shop-steward leadership gave rise to an army of recruiters on the ground, as well as a core group of strategists in the union’s national executive committee (NEC). The total identification with the union made them enormously effective and creative recruiters. A Numsa steward described his success at a Barlow’s company where stewards of the conservative South African Boilermakers’, Iron and Steelworkers’, Shipbuilders’ and Welders’ Society (SABS) were elected by management. He used a Mawu T-shirt as a recruitment method because workers came up and wanted to know what this union was, and then he explained what a truly representative union was and so recruited workers and took them out of SABS.⁶³