Читать книгу Metal that Will not Bend - Kally Forrest - Страница 31

The East Rand strikes of the early 1980s strained Mawu’s resources to the limit. The union could have responded by restricting growth, as it had in the 1970s, but the surge in worker interest gave it less and less control over recruiting networks. The Wiehahn laws had created a new confidence and workers actively sought out the union. Their optimism infected organisers with the vast opportunities available. As Fanaroff wryly observed, ‘We were opportunists, we were going to control the world, control the universe.’¹⁶ He recalled, ‘Moss used to get people marching across the veld to [Mawu’s] offices just outside Katlehong. They’d come and say: We’re on strike what do we do next? So they’d join up – 300 people at a go – then they’d sign them all overnight and go on strike. I remember Haggie had a strike like this.’ Unionists were experiencing the first heady taste of power, and industrial unions, once a theory, were now a real prospect.

Union expansion took different forms but it was seldom a strategised executive decision. A decision to organise a new area was usually a response to an approach by workers in areas such as Brits, Witbank and Richards Bay. The strategy was to focus on organising the largest and most influential factory and, as engineering firms were often the largest employers in an area, Naawu and Mawu frequently pioneered the unionisation of new industrial zones. Recruitment drives across a new zone had the added advantage of allowing for solidarity action in disputes from other Fosatu members.

Organising drives into new areas eroded important apartheid constructs. Mawu attacked the divisive bantustan system and its associated ‘deconcentrated’ industrial areas where the state sought to establish industrial bases in impoverished ethnic homelands which would provide employment and legitimise its divide and rule strategy. In this way it hoped to divest itself of the responsibility for these overpopulated areas whilst ensuring that a plentiful supply of cheap labour was available to the rest of South Africa.