Читать книгу Metal that Will not Bend - Kally Forrest - Страница 32

Union struggles in rural towns such as Richards Bay and Brits took on a distinct character because although workers were extremely vulnerable, they could draw on the support of small, cohesive communities.

In northern Natal, Mawu used an innovative organisational combination. It continued to put shop stewards and their training at the centre of organisation but it followed a form of general unionism in which community meetings played an important role in winning shop floor rights.

June-Rose Nala (now Hartley), a Mawu general secretary and later northern Natal branch secretary, commented on workers’ high levels of self-sufficiency and initiative in driving organisation in Richards Bay. As Nala was the only Fosatu organiser in the area, the strategy made good sense. She was sent to Richards Bay by the Mawu executive in 1981, and she immediately focused on training factory leaders and building efficient administrative systems in the branch office. After basic input, workers took over the organisation of individual factories.¹⁷ The aim was to unionise the whole area, as a worker at the Alusaf aluminium smelter, Jeffrey Vilane recalls: ‘It is not enough within Richards Bay to be just one company. There was Triomf. As soon as they came we started organising them, and then we started also organising others. At that time there was a general union that was taking every worker until they were strong in the factory and then we put them into their union. Our goal was to shift the whole of Richards Bay.’¹⁸

Fosatu workers at a rally six months after the launch of the Northern Natal branch (Wits archives)

Nala did not enter virgin territory as there had been pockets of union activity in Richards Bay since the early 1970s. In 1972, non-union workers at Alusaf had struck over wages, and a year later they joined the newly launched Mawu. The company, however, insisted that worker-management dealings should be conducted through a liaison committee. In May 1980 workers at a number of Richards Bay factories, including Alusaf, approached Fosatu for organising assistance, and Mawu elected to launch a northern Natal branch.¹⁹ Mawu’s decision embraced the expansion of Fosatu to the Richards Bay/Empangeni area where other affiliates had also started organising. In November 1980, 350 workers launched the Mawu office and branch.²⁰ Nala had previously visited the area as part of a Fosatu delegation and now, in 1981, she returned as northern Natal branch secretary to be met with ‘a lot of willingness and excitement that we’d come.’

Alusaf was the obvious organising platform, but management’s response was to invite SABS, affiliated to Tusca, to recruit its African employees. Workers, however, were keen to join Mawu and in less than a year, 365 of Alusaf’s 1 100 workforce had joined.²¹ After shop stewards demanded recognition, management agreed to meet the union, grant stop-order facilities and consult stewards. A shop steward described workers’ response:

There was a big change in their attitudes … every worker is united, not fighting each other. They sing freedom songs … they are now used to attending meetings … everyone will sit and listen to the meeting and ask good questions … They’re learning their own power. If there’s something happening in another department, they used to feel this is none of my business. But now they know … they must care, because in future it’s coming to him.’²²

Alusaf operated as a launching pad ‘to shift the whole of Richards Bay’. Every factory in Richards Bay became a target, and the painstaking factory-by-factory consolidation which marked earlier organisation in southern Natal in areas such as New Germany, Pinetown, Mobeni, and Jacobs was abandoned. Alusaf leaders began recruiting through large meetings of workers from factories in the adjacent townships of Esikhawini and Nseleni, recalling the methods adopted on the East Rand in 1980. Alusaf shop stewards would have been aware of this recruitment tactic through visits from East Rand shop stewards such as Rodney Mwambo, from a Benoni factory, who had joined a Fosatu organising team at Richards Bay during his July leave in 1980. At rallies, the federation, its unions and their structures were introduced and workers agreed that union structures should replace liaison committees.²³

Some at the Fosatu head office viewed the general union strategy with suspicion.²⁴ But the national union upsurge and a more permissive climate brought by the East Rand strikes allowed Nala to plot her own course.

In northern Natal Mawu’s role was to recruit wherever a sufficient number of workers from any sector showed interest. After Alusaf, there was no strategic targeting of factories. The guiding principle became ‘the organised must organise the unorganised’.²⁵ Workers at Triomf, Huletts sugar mill, Richards Bay Coal Terminal and Sappi paper mill were signed up and directed to the appropriate Fosatu affiliate. When Mawu had recruited sufficient numbers in a particular sector, it contacted the appropriate union’s general secretary and recommended the deployment of an organiser. However, most Fosatu unions delayed moving into northern Natal, partly, Nala believes, because the federation did not attach importance to far flung rural areas. In Mawu, too, she experienced a lack of support which she ascribed to her difficult relationship with the union’s white male intellectuals:

I was lucky to move up to Richards Bay getting independent space. There was always a thing about white officials who knew everything. If you think you are developing a person you think you can hold the person there but people naturally take off and want their own space …

A lot of issues were not big political differences. They were really about union control … if you talk about democracy let’s have democracy. When I saw the way people were manipulated I used to get really kind of sick. The whole inferiority thing, the complex between black and white is critical … underlying it is inferiority … maybe they were intellectuals, maybe we were relying on them for information and so on. There was tension, especially towards the end with me because I was constantly thinking why is it like this? When are we going to learn that we are equals? At the same time they (white intellectuals) had a place in the organisation. They had talents, they had abilities which we don’t have.

Nala speaking at a Fosatu rally in Northern Natal in 1980, behind her stands Erwin (Wits archives)

Despite these complexities, Nala ultimately emerged as an autonomous worker intellectual who stood in creative tension with white intellectuals in Mawu and Fosatu.

According to Nala; members and their stewards ‘owned the union’. She contrasted this state with that in southern Natal where factories were scattered and employed workers from a wide range of communities – in southern Natal, she argued, union officials created a dependency by transporting workers and convening meetings. In northern Natal, shop stewards set up meetings, arranged venues and hired vehicles. ‘Workers at Alusaf were fantastic, they used to whip around, everyone donates. They gave freely and continually. It was very important to them knowing it was their organisation, it succeeded.’ Nala was only summoned to a factory if workers needed advice. ‘Don’t come this week,’ they would say, ‘we’re cleaning up the kaffir business,’ and they would have stoppages on the shopfloor demanding people get disciplined or kicked right out. I would have nothing to do with it. Richards Bay was full of raw fascistic types, right-wingers and racists. White workers in Richards Bay were part of commandos [military units]. It’s a little island up there you can do what you like.’ Nala herself, although unaware of its extent at the time, was viewed by white staff at Alusaf with extreme racism. She was told later that an Alusaf secretary had smashed and thrown away the company’s cups because ‘kaffirs drank out of them’.

By mid–1982, unions were well known in northern Natal, but the spark for a union conquest of the area was a bitter strike at Alusaf in July 1982.²⁶ In the wake of nationwide strikes by workers demanding the withdrawal of their pension contributions, Alusaf workers asked to withdraw from the Metal Industries Group Pension Fund (MIGPF) (the fund allowed workers to claim their pensions, often their only savings, after the age of 65). The workers’ aim was to set up a new fund governed by worker-negotiated rules. Alusaf delayed taking up the demand with the metal industrial council, to which Mawu did not belong. Shop stewards approached management while 1 700 workers from various shifts milled around the canteen, tensely waiting for a report back. Nala explains what happened next:

Alusaf had long concrete walls. The police, commandos, soldiers pinned them up against concrete walls, beat the hell out of them. Some guys had eight stitches. Workers forced the concrete wall to collapse for them to get out of there. People knew the people, they worked with supervisors, they were very reluctant to go back and work with them. We couldn’t talk sense into that strike because I think what happened had never happened anywhere. Being beaten into a strike is rather different than going out on strike. People were at hospitals, in the shrubs. Richards Bay is built on water. There were people who fell into the swamps and were collected there by ambulances … it was really, really horrific. And workers were angry. The strike went on for a month.

In the first week all workers were fired. The strike they were ‘beaten into’ almost triggered a general strike in the area, especially as other workers had downed tools at Richards Bay Coal Terminal and Triomf, over similar grievances.²⁷ Workers at Grinaker and Fraser Chalmers mounted short solidarity stoppages after hearing that 12 workers had been hospitalised and 16 arrested, and that Alusaf management had asked their employers to supply replacement staff. An area-wide strike committee of representatives from communities and factories was elected to coordinate the response to the disputes. When police banned meetings in Esikhawini, where most Alusaf workers lived, the committee mounted a stay-away.²⁸ Transport & General Workers Union bus drivers refused to transport passengers to work, while members of Fosatu’s food affiliate in pineapple canning factories and sugar mills extended their lunch hours and staged weekly protest stoppages.²⁹

As other employers pressed Alusaf to settle, the company abruptly capitulated and sacked its managing director. It agreed to present Mawu’s proposal to the industrial council and it undertook to set up a provident fund. With company executives, Nala travelled to the Seifsa offices in Johannesburg to reclaim workers’ pension money. ‘I drove back from Johannesburg; if anyone had known, I must have had millions of rands in my car, cheques.’ Hundreds of workers were waiting outside the union offices for their cheques worth up to R20 000. ‘We had such a braai. Everyone came and ate!’

The Alusaf strike highlighted what Fanaroff called the union’s ‘opportunism’ – its ability to seize the moment. It mobilised thousands of northern Natal workers. Vilane, who became Fosatu’s regional chair, recalled how it helped to open up areas beyond Richards Bay, including Isithebe in the nearby KwaZulu homeland‘s deconcentration zone. Politically, too, the stay-away exposed workers and township residents to the power of community/worker solidarity.