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The strike at German multinational Volkswagen, Uitenhage’s largest employer, had a significant impact on bargaining demands and the style of industrial action in the 1980s.

The great strike: 1980 Volkswagen living wage strike with union leaders addressing workers (Wits archives)

The factory was organised by UAW/Numarwosa in the late 1970s, and recognition, including the right to bargain wages on the Eastern Cape auto industrial council, was quickly secured. But as the union’s general secretary Freddie Sauls pointed out, a recognition agreement is only as strong as workers’ power to enforce it.⁵ Worker grievances at VW simmered below the surface.

Unlike the mass of Mawu’s members on the East Rand, they were not migrants and their prime concern was not job security. Most of VW’s African and coloured employees lived in urban townships and the former had urban residence rights, so that they could not be ‘endorsed out’ of the city if they lost their jobs.

Pay was the main grievance. Volkswagen declared proudly that it was paying above the poverty datum line (PDL), but workers pointed out that the PDL did not include clothing, furniture, schoolbooks, entertainment and other everyday expenses that whites took for granted. They resented the calculation of their living costs by academics remote from their deprivation. In advance of the 1980 industrial council round, they drew up their own ‘living wage’ figure based on a survey of workers’ needs and arrived at a minimum of R2 an hour, which they were determined to negotiate⁶ - this met resolute resistance from management, and after weeks of negotiations talks deadlocked with employers offering R1,40 an hour.⁷

On 15 June, workers arranged a report-back meeting in Uitenhage’s Jubilee Hall, but the chief magistrate banned it. Frustrated, they decided to strike on the next day and report to members on company premises. About 3 500 African and coloured workers downed tools in an illegal strike and gathered on the lawns outside the managing director’s office. After instructing shop stewards to negotiate, they waited on the company premises, fearing a lockout if they left.

A riot police officer warns Volkswagen workers to disperse outside the company’s Uitenhage plant in June 1980 (Jack Cooper Evening Post)

Meanwhile, news of the VW action spread and labour unrest erupted through local industry. At least a thousand workers downed tools over wages at 11 other plants including Goodyear, SKF and even the municipality. As Numarwosa organiser Les Kettledas recalled, it touched off a massive security force crackdown: ‘The whole town became an operational area. The army was flown in. Barbed wire was put on the streets to keep [workers] from entering into town. Newspapers were blacked out. It was like a war zone.’⁸ Violence broke out as police fired teargas and birdshot, set dogs on workers and clashed with township youth.

These strikes petered out within ten days and a number of strikers were fired. The VW strike, however, continued, and the union made shrewd use of its German union connections. From day one, officials were in touch with the IMF and the German metal union IG Metall. Knowing that the German unions were monitoring the strike, and that the Bundestag was holding hearings on German investment in South Africa, management restrained the police from acting against strikers.⁹

The company persistently tried to divide the strikers by leaving the company gates open and offering pay rises to those who returned to work. It even hired a helicopter to drop leaflets on neighbouring townships, promoting its offer. Only 50 workers responded. After three weeks, and the intervention of an IMF negotiator from Germany, the dispute was settled. Workers accepted a R1,48 per hour minimum and employers agreed to increase this to R2 within 18 months.¹⁰

The dispute was remarkable for several reasons. The notion of demanding a living wage was unprecedented. It pushed forward industrial relations and pushed back political horizons instantly and dramatically. Sactu had popularised a similar concept – through its pound-a-day campaign in 1958 but this had been largely symbolic.¹¹ It was also the first major example of coloured and African worker unity (apartheid had systematically separated African and coloured workers who had formerly resided in the same townships). Finally, it was a trial of strength unprecedented in South African labour history and remarkable in the context of high apartheid.

The strike was notable for the unions’ disciplined use of power where worker solidarity was sustained over a prolonged period. It included daily meetings outside the plant where strikers heard reports from negotiators and made collective decisions. Workers showed considerable tactical sophistication, banking on their skills being difficult to replace and that VW had to meet orders in a booming car market. VW’s Ollie Rademayer observed that ‘if we’d had fired them, we know that we would have had to rehire the same people … we’d given those people skills. There were no other skilled people in Uitenhage.’¹² The swift post-settlement return to work underscored the unions’ power. The strike also sounded a warning about the shortcomings of industrial councils and other features of the bargaining system promoted by employers and the state: VW had scrapped its liaison committee, but other strike-hit companies tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate through these non-union bodies.

The shrewd methods used by workers to maintain strike solidarity also foreshadowed many future struggles, particularly in small towns. Union members made strategic use of the Uitenhage Black Civic Organisation, in which many UAW shop stewards occupied leadership positions. The civic held regular meetings to inform residents, distributed pamphlets and conducted house visits to prevent scabbing and to solicit financial support for strikers and their families.¹³

The strike also bolstered shop stewards, who had ensured the orderly conduct of the strike and its resolution. When the company had sent its labour relations manager to talk to strikers, he was angrily spurned. Vuyo Kwinana a VW activist recounted: ‘We didn’t want our complaints channelled through them [labour relations department]. We want channels through our shop stewards and to the top management, because we wanted a direct reply.’¹⁴ Workers learnt valuable lessons about the wielding of power. Many spoke of how their first instinct was to confront the white power structures head on rather than to elect shop steward representatives to negotiate on their behalf after they had fully discussed, in a general meeting, what their demand to management would be. But the older, more experienced activists who had learnt from past struggles in the ANC, Sactu and the PAC, and the pragmatic Numarwosa unionists, educated members on the dangers of undisciplined action and on the importance of nominating an accountable leadership to represent them in negotiations with management. Brian Fredricks, a Numarwosa official, noted that if shop-steward leadership had not been in close touch with workers, ‘the situation would have been uncontrollable’.¹⁵ The strike had however confronted the unions with a dilemma which would become familiar in later strike waves: where to concentrate resources. Numarwosa’s Freddie Sauls explained:

The strategy was to keep the pressures on management, to keep the leadership together at all times … so we couldn’t do it at Volkswagen and analyse the situation on a day to day with Goodyear. It would be impossible, because the only two guys who where basically directly involved were myself and Brian Fredricks. We had to say, ‘Look, Volkswagen is the target, the key plant, and we’ve got to hold the plant together.’¹⁶

The decision ensured success at VW but there were costs. Some Goodyear members accused Numarwosa of abandoning them and defected to rival Macwusa.¹⁷

Above all, the strike gave VW workers and Uitenhage’s townships their first taste of real power. When the strikers staged an illegal march from the factory through white Uitenhage to the townships, the police stood back. Kwinana recalls a rush of power: ‘We are commanding. The workers are commanding now. No more the police or the labour relations department.’ Another worker recalled the strike as a turning point in factory relations: ‘If the master said “Do that”, you used to run to do that without questioning why … now he must explain why he sends me there, because I’m working here.’¹⁸

Buoyed by this victory, VW workers waged other successful actions over disciplinary and retrenchment procedures, protection from assaults by supervisors, wage increases, the reinstatement of victimised shop stewards, pension rights and new technology. Soon after the strike, VW became the first South African workplace to agree to full-time shop stewards. By 1984, it had five full-time and 26 part-time shop stewards who were permitted one hour a day in which to execute shop-steward duties.¹⁹

By October 1980 Uitenhage had become a Fosatu town and a number of plants were negotiating pay outside the industrial council. This spelled the demise of racially defined parallel unions. Workers at a tyre plant chased away Micwu organisers who were attempting to recruit African members, and coloured workers left established unions in numbers to join Numarwosa.²⁰

News of the VW strike spread rapidly in union circles. Fosatu’s Alec Erwin commented that ‘the strike was the first in which giving workers a say ate into company profits. It showed that recognition gave workers new confidence and power.’²¹ Fosatu Worker News noted that ‘these increases are the largest achieved by the union, but more important the companies accepted that a reasonable living wage must be paid.’²² It was through this strike that the notion of a living wage was born which would dominate bargaining agendas for years to come. Both Fosatu and Cosatu used the living wage as a bargaining goal and Cosatu adopted a living wage campaign as part of its militant programme of action in 1986.

In breaking down the apartheid barriers between coloured and African workers, Numarwosa/UAW built on pre-existing residential and social contacts. In Uitenhage, coloured and African people had lived together in Kabah township since the 1840s and social relations had continued despite government’s luring many coloured people to the more developed townships. This social contact was reinforced by strong sporting links between African and coloured men on the rugby field. Combined with an African leadership which had close links into the ANC and PAC underground, it resulted in a level of union organisation not witnessed in other auto factories in the area. Port Elizabeth presented a sharp contrast, and workers in the city’s factories did not show the same interracial solidarity: the 1955 removal of Africans from the integrated Korsten township meant that coloured and African people were insulated from each other and social interaction was minimal.²³

International solidarity, the foundations of which were laid in the 1970s, also proved a powerful strike weapon. Detlev Tenzer relates that IG Metall had helped the emerging South African unions to access funding and shop steward training. It had also pressured German firms with subsidiaries in South Africa to recognise unions and give them the same rights as unions back home.²⁴ Ties with IG Metall and the IMF had been further strengthened by John Gomomo, a VW shop steward, sent by management to observe industrial relations in Britain, Belgium and Germany.²⁵

On many levels, the VW strike challenged the apartheid order. Triggered by a ban on a legitimate meeting, it had brought African and coloured workers together in a living wage demand which affirmed the right of the oppressed to a share of South Africa’s wealth. Black workers had outmanoeuvred management, the white residents of Uitenhage and the security forces. They had also said a resounding ‘no’ to the bargaining institutions of the apartheid state.