Читать книгу Metal that Will not Bend - Kally Forrest - Страница 28

In August 1982, Mawu’s AGM reported that the Transvaal membership had grown from 6 000 to 10 000 in a year and 2 000 workers attended the AGM in contrast to a hundred in the previous year.⁸⁰ Yet the union was realising that even with shop stewards councils, the strikes could not be properly managed. Said Fanaroff: ‘Until April [1982], we won every strike. Then we started losing. The recession wasn’t the main reason; employers were no longer confused … The first time workers struck, the employer gave in; the second time he gave them the benefit of the doubt; by the third he had decided to smash them and knew how to do it.’⁸¹ Mawu now had mass membership without organisational structures to support it which allowed employers to crack down. A Mawu AGM report complained that stewards were left to face management ‘without planning or experience.’⁸²

The symbol of this employer backlash was a strike at Anglo American Scaw Metals in Germiston. Scaw’s chair, Graham Boustred, was the driving force behind Seifsa’s ‘industrial council only’ wage bargaining stance. A strike at the factory the previous year had won reinstatement of a worker after a racial incident, as well as the informal recognition of Mawu. But the parties remained deadlocked on plant bargaining.⁸³

In April 1982, Scaw workers decided to establish the principle of plant bargaining by demanding a minuscule 10c an hour increase at plant level while industrial council talks were in progress. Mayekiso recalled: ‘They said: “Why should we be represented by people who are not taking a mandate from the workers? Now we are the force, but the employers can’t talk to us. Let us take this issue straight onto the shop floor.”’⁸⁴ Scaw ignored the demand, insisting that ‘in the interests of long-term stability, sound labour relations and an effective bargaining structure, it is vital that workers realise that stoppages during negotiations will not win concessions.’⁸⁵ In response Fosatu Worker News exclaimed: ‘Shop stewards and union representatives were amazed that a management with a liberal image like Anglo American could refuse a 10 cents an hour increase while they had already offered more than that on the council.’⁸⁶

According to Scaw’s human resources director Allen Murray, centralised bargaining ‘was an ideology, a religion’ for Boustred. He believed that plant increases above the council minimum would allow ‘the rats and mice of the industry’, the smaller competitors, to undermine Scaw.⁸⁷ About 3 000 workers struck and were fired en masse in what Bobby Godsell, Anglo’s industrial relations consultant, called ‘a symbolic sacking’.⁸⁸ It was a formidable defeat for Mawu’s plant bargaining strategy although Murray asserts that there was no attempt by Scaw to ‘break’ the union. ‘It was more to get the power balance right after the union’s victory in 1981. Scaw were not union bashers.’

Mark Swilling’s 1984 analysis of the union’s role in this defeat, attributes it in part to a breakdown in the union’s organisational structures:

Mawu and the SSC [shop stewards council] in particular failed to back up the Scaw workers because of an overall weakness in Mawu’s organisational structures … the SSC was actually trying to restrain the Scaw workers from going on strike at the point they believed that the necessary organisational preparations were absent. Its amorphous organisational structures were incapable of providing a framework for a strategy which could have taken advantage of the historic opportunity to smash the NIC [national industrial council] that the Scaw strike afforded.⁸⁹

It is clearly true that its weak organisational structures contributed to the defeat, yet Swilling fails to recognise the corollary in this – the relative power of capital in relation to the union’s strength. Mawu did not have the capacity or organised power to take on the country’s largest employer which was determined to force bargaining at industry level. In the circumstances, the union had no option but to admit defeat and use it as an opportunity to return to the drawing board. Ultimately the industrial council that Swilling lambasts Mawu for not ‘smashing’ was to become a source of industry-wide power for the union.

Swilling also argues that Mawu’s organisational weaknesses allowed for a split in the union as power began ‘shifting towards a leading stratum of personnel.’ This in turn entailed a decline in worker participation and worker control and the danger of a drift towards unrepresentative union bureaucracy. The union certainly suffered from organisational failings but it is also clear that the East Rand strike wave strengthened it. It popularised unions and their role in fighting for workers’ rights and established Mawu as the union of choice among South Africa’s largest concentration of metal workers. Workers were now organising themselves and coming to the union office. ‘We don’t have to go to the factories to recruit these days,’ commented one organiser.⁹⁰

Paradoxically, Swilling draws a negative inference from the powerful worker leaders the strikes threw up, seeing the advanced shop steward echelon as the kernel of a union elite.⁹¹ In reality, thousands of workers, organised and unorganised and at every level of the labour movement, learned valuable lessons about the wielding of power during this upsurge. Many layers of leadership emerged in the union and the community, not solely at the level of advanced shop stewards.

Moreover, the strikes were, as Ruiters maintains, profoundly political.⁹² The shop stewards councils allowed ordinary workers to talk openly about politics for the first time since the early 1960s. For many workers, the struggle in the factories was continuous with the broader struggle for liberation. The councils provided ‘a focus for workers around issues beyond the factory …’⁹³ as workers appealed to township residents for support and mobilised people in trains, hostels, shebeens and churches.

At this stage, the political awakening was not identified with a particular formation but rather, as the Katlehong chair put it, ‘we are not fighting only for a 20c wage increase, but for our rights and for our country.’⁹⁴ Moreover, the Fosatu unions’ non-racism dovetailed with the ANC tradition and thus boosted the resurgence of the ANC in opposition to the Black Consciousness Movement, particularly through the Congress of South African Students (Cosas) which was strong on the East Rand.⁹⁵

For migrant workers, the primary awakening came through the experience of power in collective action. As one migrant expressed it: ‘Other workers see that these workers have got for themselves power over management during the strike. They see and they tell themselves that it is this kind of power that can help us to get our rights. This was a challenge to them to do the same, to go on strike to get their own power.’⁹⁶