Читать книгу Metal that Will not Bend - Kally Forrest - Страница 9

There were other unions too, in the metal sector, which were to have a significant impact on Numsa’s accumulation of power in the 1980s. Rooted in a different tradition, they emerged from conservative, registered unions affiliated to Tucsa. Three of them, the coloured National Union of Motor Assembly and Rubber Workers of South Africa (Numarwosa), its African parallel United Automobile Workers (UAW), and the Western Province Motor Assemblers Workers’ Union (WPMawu) were launched in the Eastern and Western Cape in the 1960s and early 1970s. They moved into large auto factories, and so did not experience Mawu’s complex problem of how to organise hundreds of small engineering outfits.

Signing Mawu’s first recognition agreement with Tensile Rubber: L-R Alfred Manamela, shop stewards chairman; H Schutz, managing director; Andrew Zulu, vice-president Mawu; Bernie Fanaroff, Mawu organiser (Bernie Fanaroff)

Auto factories sprang up in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the Eastern Cape, when North American and Japanese producers expanded into the low-wage economies of the Third World. Ford and General Motors launched major expansion programmes and Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage grew with them. The growth of assembly plants encouraged the expansion of the components industry, initially producing low value-added items such as tyres, glass, upholstery, tubes, paint and hang-on components. State policy makers saw in the industry the seeds of a broader industrialisation strategy and began to push a local content programme, which led to the rapid expansion of the industry in the 1960s as new producers established plants and component suppliers sprang up alongside them.³⁶

The result was a sharp rise in employment in the area. Automated assembly lines gave employers direct control over the pace of work through foremen with the power to grant pay rises and exercise discipline. Pay was relatively high. White workers were the first to organise and gain recognition for their union, Yster en Staal, in the 1960s, and in 1968 the Industrial Council for the Automobile Manufacturing Industry for the Eastern Cape was formed. Over time, coloured workers replaced whites as they moved into more skilled employment. In 1965, the Eastern and Western Cape had been zoned by the government as coloured labour preference areas, in which less skilled jobs were reserved for coloureds with the aim of excluding Africans. As a consequence, coloureds were far more numerous in auto assembly, although after 1985, as influx control laws fell away, many Africans entered the labour force. In the Transvaal, African labour dominated.³⁷

Owing to the importance of the auto sector as an employer in Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage, it became the first target of the independent unions in the Eastern Cape in the 1970s. Total employment in the auto sector in 1979 stood at 21 009 of which whites constituted 35,6 per cent, coloureds 34,9 per cent and Africans 22,6 per cent.³⁸

Automobile conference bringing together Johnny Mke of Western WPMawu, Fred Sauls of Naawu, and James Campbell of Numarwosa (Wits archives)

Before 1967, coloured workers in auto and tyre companies were not organised. They were covered by the Industrial Conciliation Act which allowed for the formation of racially exclusive registered coloured unions which sat on the auto industrial council.³⁹ An organiser was sent by Tucsa to form a coloured union in the auto industry and from these initiatives grew Numarwosa which was launched in 1967 with 4 500 members.⁴⁰

In the early days, Numarwosa did not have a policy of building worker-controlled factory structures to promote internal democracy. When members had a grievance, they turned to Tucsa officials at the union office. ‘We were in a Tucsa frame of mind. But the loose committee structure in the plants slowly developed into something like a shop steward system,’ commented an early organiser, Fred Sauls.⁴¹ The union conducted little membership education and when factory committee members attended industrial council meetings they were often at sea. Sauls recalls:

We ended up in the IC without knowing the damn what we were doing there! Nobody had explained to us in the plant what the IC was all about … so we ended up in the council listening to what is happening, and afterwards we found out the agreement is being concluded. We go back to the workers, the workers ask, ‘What’s happening?’ We say we don’t know … I phoned the branch secretary and I said, ‘Look this is not the way things should operate.’ We started to question the things about accountability, what are the organisers doing? How are they accountable to the worker reps in the plant?⁴²

At Ford, coloured union members singled out long-service workers who could stand up to the foreman. Over time, one or two workers in every department helped the organising committee to recruit. When the union had a substantial majority, it approached management, and by 1968 it was pressing management for recognition. Coloured workers also began to demand accountable organisers who were now required to provide a daily account of their whereabouts.⁴³

From a base at Ford, GM and Rover, Numarwosa expanded to Volkswagen in Uitenhage. In 1970 it set up a national executive committee and joined Tucsa. Three years after its launch, Numarwosa had recruited a majority of coloured auto workers, and had established branches in Durban and East London. Branch executive members had resisted recruiting Africans, but when Sauls was elected branch secretary in 1971 he moved to include Africans and strengthen shop-floor structures. During the 1960s, office bearers had been elected in poorly attended meetings in a venue removed from factories, but now office bearers and shop stewards were elected on the factory floor and by 1979 the union could claim a presence in every major automobile and tyre company and had ‘hundreds of committee members, branch chairmen, vice-chairmen, shop stewards and shop committee members’.⁴⁴ It also offered sickness, death, distress and retirement benefits. The union’s constitution barred shop stewards from meeting management alone and required them to report to members on any discussions with the company. Over time, shop stewards became the union stronghold and, as with Mawu, served as a leadership core for the union as a whole.⁴⁵

Initially, Numarwosa wanted to organise Africans out of a concern for their impoverishment and because it believed racial divisions sapped worker power. Also at issue, however, was the union’s weakness on the industrial council, as Sauls explains:

We had representation on the industrial council although it was not effective. We realised that just having coloureds there to represent coloured interests is not going to effectively challenge management. So, we developed links with African workers in the plants. On the industrial council, management saw two groups of black workers – the coloureds represented by the national union on the one side, and the Africans represented by the Bantu Labour Office on the other. We did not feel satisfied just speaking for the Africans with them having no voice … to improve the conditions of workers, we needed a unified structure.⁴⁶

Numarwosa first decided to approach Africans in late 1972, while it was still in Tucsa. To circumvent the law, it used the tactical device of forming UAW as a parallel to the white and coloured unions which were covered by industrial relations laws, but with amalgamation into one union as the long-term aim. In Tucsa, parallel coloured and African union leaders were appointed by the white union executive and they were neither developed nor encouraged as trade unionists. In a break from this practice, UAW’s members elected leaders to an independent executive and sat with Numarwosa on a joint advisory committee.⁴⁷ It is not often acknowledged that the independent UTP (Urban Training Project) associated with Tucsa also played a role in UAW’s early formation. Numarwosa and UTP assisted in the launch of UAW, and in 1975 UTP helped to establish a Pretoria branch and trained Dorah Nowatha to become an organiser. A UTP organiser, Michael Faya, became UAW’s first national secretary in 1974.⁴⁸

UAW struggled to survive in its early years and organising Africans was a slow and secretive business. Workers were fearful, and union resources meagre. Yet beneath Africans’ cautious facade lay long-standing grievances, particularly around racial discrimination and unfair dismissal. The foremen’s sweeping powers included granting leave, giving permission to use toilets and decisions on wage increases, retrenchments and dismissals. An industrial relations director at General Motors joked: ‘The biggest optimist in the workforce was the guy who brought his sandwiches to work, because he had no assurance that he’d still be there at lunch time.’⁴⁹ Formal complaints and appeal procedures were unheard of.

In some factories, including Volkswagen, former ANC, PAC and Sactu activists played a crucial organising role. Vuyo Kwinana and Themba Dyassi, for example, were members of an ANC underground cell and had served prison sentences. Elijah ‘Scoma’ Antonie had attended ANC and Sactu lectures, whilst Albert Gomomo was a PAC member who recruited his younger brother, John Gomomo, into the union. The recruiting drive in Uitenhage was an important venture into nonracial organising and shop floor control, as these activists, helped by Numarwosa, built secret cells across departments. Scoma and Papa Williams, Numarwosa’s president and a strong advocate of African membership, were rugby playing friends and worked in the same department. They and others developed a similar position to Mawu’s on political independence. Recalls Scoma: ‘If the ANC is banned, it stands to reason Sactu is also going to be banned. Now in order to avoid that, we did not want to align ourselves with ANC directly. We wanted to be an independent body.’⁵⁰ This policy had the added advantage of attracting activists from different political groupings and nonpolitical workers.

These unionists used the tactic of taking over statutory liaison committees. Unlike the Tuacc unions, Numarwosa had no political objection to them. Often, liaison committee members were drawn from clandestine factory BECs. From 1973, Numarwosa shop stewards and liaison committee members began meeting regularly to ensure that the committee did not undermine the union’s industrial council negotiations.⁵¹

At Volkswagen (VW), union activists used the liaison committee to organise Africans into UAW and to win company recognition, and the close cooperation between coloured Numarwosa leaders and African factory activists made it easier to promote UAW to management. This powerful unity of coloured and African leaders was, however, not a feature of other auto factories. At Ford, for example, coloureds were employed at the Neave plant and African workers at the Cortina and Struandale plants.⁵²

In the components sector, the liaison committee strategy was also used. Daniel Dube, a worker at SKF Bearings in Uitenhage and later Numsa president, recounted how UAW president John Mke and Numarwosa’s Sauls joined forces to gain recognition at SKF, a Swedish subsidiary, in 1976. Meeting resistance, they recruited liaison committee members and, after winning their support, used them as recruiters. Supported by a Swedish union which put pressure on the parent company, they succeeded in winning recognition in May 1977. Dube remembers this as a significant breakthrough, as SKF shop stewards rapidly recruited members in other Uitenhage component factories, including Dorbyl, Borg-Warner, Bosal and National Standard. Port Elizabeth followed suit, with recruiting gains at Willard Batteries, Autoplastics and Dorbyl. Uitenhage shop stewards also helped other emerging unions, including the NUTW and the Sweet Food and Allied Workers Union (SFAWU).⁵³

John Gomomo, a recruiter for UAW and later a Numsa office bearer and Cosatu president (W Matlala)

By the end of 1979, UAW had significant membership at six Port Elizabeth factories and had won recognition at VW, SKF, Ford and General Motors, including stop-order facilities. It had become the first genuinely national union in the new union movement, with branches in Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage, Durban and East London and a presence in large plants in Pretoria.⁵⁴

One of Numarwosa/UAW’s critical contributions was the building of strong black leadership for the new union movement. Much of it was developed in day to day factory struggles and by the end of the 1970s it was managing large-scale industrial action. Sauls recalls the impact of unionisation in the Eastern Cape by the early 1980s:

They [trade unions] have had a tremendous impact on the area. Companies are multinationals but I can say their attitudes have definitely changed. What is important to me is that people around Uitenhage and PE have really been made aware of the role of trade unionism … during the strike at VW [in 1980], the church people, without our approaching them, have sent circulars to some of the churches telling them that they must address themselves to the conditions under which their congregations are living and working. First it was the Eveready strike, then it was Ford, now it’s the strike at VW. Since then, a lot of people are sitting up. We’ve at least reached the stage where the balance of power across the negotiating table is more or less equal: we don’t have to beg or plead any more. They [workers] realise where the power is: it’s not across the negotiating table. The power is in the capital of management and in the labour power of workers on the floor.

The 1978 strike at British battery manufacturer Eveready was the first legal strike in South Africa for twenty years. Numarwosa’s 320 members, mostly coloured women, struck to demand recognition. Gloria Barry, a former Eveready worker and later vice-president of Numarwosa, recalls that ‘the conditions that these women worked under in Eveready were very bad … once the production lines started, they couldn’t leave to go to the toilet! There were boxes put down and they had to relieve themselves on the line.’⁵⁵ During the strike the company called in the police, used scab labour and fired all the strikers, who continued striking for a further six months without success and suffered for years from a blacklist used by local companies.

Thozamile Botha, Ford Cortina Struandale worker and Pebco leader (EP Herald)

The Eveready defeat made a deep impression on the emerging unions. It hardened their attitude to the official bargaining system by highlighting that a legal strike did not protect workers from dismissal or police action and that union registration did not guarantee bargaining rights.⁵⁶ It also underscored the limits to the strategy of organising foreign-owned companies. One useful consequence of the strike, however, was the strengthening of ties between Numarwosa and Tuacc. Tuacc’s Alec Erwin visited Port Elizabeth during the dispute and was impressed. ‘They lost but that had nothing to do with the way they organised it. The strike convinced me we had a lot to learn from them.’⁵⁷

A series of strikes at Ford in 1979 provided some salutary lessons which forced the union to examine its policy of political independence. The first strike began in October 1979 at the Cortina Struandale Plant when Thozamile Botha, a trainee draughtsman and leader of the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organisation (Pebco), resigned because the company was putting pressure on him over his political activity. Workers distributed pamphlets warning that ‘if he [Botha] is not here at noon today, tools down everybody’. Port Elizabeth was emerging as a centre of African resistance to apartheid, and Botha was addressing rallies of 10 000 people. At noon, 700 African workers gathered on the company’s lawns for Botha to address them. Ford’s personnel officer urged them to return to work and asked UAW’s John Mke to translate. When workers heard their union president talking management language, Mke’s days as a worker leader were over.⁵⁸

The irony was that UAW supported the workers’ demands; after the strike ended with Botha’s reinstatement, it negotiated full pay for strikers. Countering Pebco’s accusations that it had sold out the workers, Sauls retorted angrily: ‘It was clear to us: Pebco used this to show their control over workers. And they succeeded. They could get all the workers out and keep them out for three days. It was then clear that Botha was not pursuing the interests of the workers. He did not ask the question about the lost pay.’ In a press statement, Numarwosa organiser George Manase restated the union’s policy: ‘We are fighting for the liberation of the black people … we should operate on our area – trade unions – and politicians in theirs. We must work on parallel lines. These militant radicals interfere with us.’⁵⁹ Other BEC members endorsed his view, while Sauls reaffirmed the need for unions to maintain their political independence.

Women strikers from Eveready in Port Elizabeth receiving food parcels and strike pay of R10 each from Danny Leen (left), organising secretary of the National Union of Motor Assembly and Rubber Workers, in November 1978 (EP Herald)

The leadership of UAW and Numarwosa were not, however, apolitical. They rejected racial divisions and were concerned to build workers’ awareness of themselves as able to overcome exploitation and a sense of inferiority to whites. In the mid-1970s, as they linked up with unions elsewhere, they began to develop education programmes which cast workers as an oppressed class. Their perspective would bring them closer to the leaders of Mawu.

The Pebco stoppage triggered a spate of strikes at Ford in which UAW negotiated on workers’ behalf and when the company fired 700 strikers it demanded reinstatement. At this point the power struggle between UAW and Pebco resurfaced, with a group of dismissed workers electing an independent Pebco committee, later the Ford Workers Committee, to negotiate with management. Eventually, an embarrassed US government intervened and Ford agreed to reinstate the strikers.⁶⁰

The Ford dispute raised issues for the UAW leaders, who were clearly out of touch with worker militancy. When they told workers that Ford was open to partial reinstatement, they were accused of being sell-outs and likened to hated community councillors.

A few months later, the Ford committee launched the rival Motor Assembly and Component Workers Union of South Africa (Macwusa), committed to fighting for rights in the townships as well as in factories. Over time, Macwusa recruited members in Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage and Pretoria, although it never overtook UAW and Numarwosa membership.⁶¹

Some of the 700 Ford workers leaving the Ford Struandale assembly plant after a meeting in November 1979. Management considered workers to have terminated their service (EP Herald: Siphiwe)

WPMawu delegation to Fosatu launch in 1979 (Joe Foster front left) (Wits archives)

The Ford disputes forced the UAW to examine its organising strategy. It concluded that organisers and factory representatives did not meet members often enough and that it had failed to build strong factory structures, allowing militants to view it as a management–government puppet. The weakness of the liaison committee strategy was also brought into strong relief. The union responded by strengthening shop steward structures and renegotiating grievance procedures to ensure that workers had a voice, and the upshot was the signing of an unusually sophisticated agreement in which Ford agreed to full-time shop stewards on full pay – a precedent soon followed by VW.⁶²

The strikes signalled that workers would inevitably turn their newfound confidence and factory power to the voicing of wider political grievances. They also alerted other employers to the danger of dealing with ineffective worker structures. Among other workers in the Eastern Cape, and elsewhere in South Africa, these workers’ militancy and victories were watched with keen interest.⁶³

At the time that Numarwosa was breaking out of the Tucsa mould, another coloured union, the Western Province Motor Assemblers Union (WPMawu) was challenging Tucsa’s leadership. Formed in Cape Town in 1961 by coloured workers, it soon won recognition at Austen Motors, Chrysler and British Leyland. Natie Gantana, a Leyland worker and president of WPMawu, recalled that at this stage the union ‘had a sad history because it had a sad executive. It was recognised by law and the company but it didn’t operate in the workers’ interests … The leaders were management guys – they didn’t want to put up a hard fight … The shop stewards were senior blokes, inspectors and charge hands, and the blue overall guys never qualified to be shop stewards.’⁶⁴

A persistent worker grievance was that union leaders negotiated better pay rises for higher grades at Leyland, including themselves. A small group of union activists campaigned house to house and at a general meeting members passed a motion of no confidence in the executive. They formed an interim executive committee, suspended a proposed merger with UAW, and voted out the old executive in 1972.⁶⁵

In the same year, Joe Foster, a printworker, was appointed national secretary (Tucsa’s secretaries were not elected) and began restoring worker control through accountable shop stewards. Foster commented: ‘We believe very strongly in participatory democracy, in grassroots democracy. We, the executive and officials, could run the union efficiently like a business if we wanted to … but we don’t think things should run that way. We believe that a future democratic South Africa should be run by the people, that the workers should participate in the running of the country.’⁶⁶

WPMawu broke with Tucsa in 1972 and tried to convince Numarwosa to do likewise,⁶⁷ but the latter followed only four years later. Sauls recalls why it left:

When we started looking at our relationship with UAW and the direction in which the union was going our affiliation to Tucsa and the IMF [International Metalworkers Federation] became important issues.⁶⁸ In our discussions the question arose that if the UAW does not fit into Tucsa there must be something drastically wrong with that organisation. We had discussions with Tucsa unions at annual conferences to see how they viewed the bringing in of African workers into the Tucsa fold … when we had feedback from this, we were shocked … so we decided we are just wasting our time in Tucsa.

It was at this point that Sauls decided to sound out WPMawu on the question of unity. Foster recalls Sauls convening a meeting in 1976 with other unions at the US consulate in Johannesburg. Foster, who had socialist leanings, viewed the attempt with suspicion. It was a later initiative from the IMF to form a southern African coordinating committee that ultimately brought the Cape unions, as well as Mawu, together. Foster recalls: ‘When Alec [Erwin, of Mawu] came to IMF meetings and started to talk about workers’ control, we realised we had an affinity.’

EAWU organiser and later Mawu Western Transvaal organiser Petrus Tom (Wits archnives)

The IMF Southern African Coordinating Council also forged links between these unions and another dissident Tucsa affiliate which emerged in the 1970s, the Engineering and Allied Workers Union (Eawu). It was started in the mid-1960s as part of Tucsa’s African Affairs Committee of the Sheet Metal Workers Union. Sactu bitterly opposed its formation, viewing it as Tucsa ‘splitting tactics’ and Sactu historians Luckhardt and Wall claimed that ‘it never really got off the ground’.⁶⁹ It did, however, get off the ground when it was expelled from Tucsa and received help from the Urban Training Project (UTP). EAWU grew in strength, and by 1974 its paid up membership was 3 000; its signed up membership was 9 000 by 1976, by which time it was financially independent.⁷⁰

An EAWU organiser, Petrus Tom, was successfully organising large numbers of engineering workers in the Vaal branch in the industrial areas of Vanderbijlpark and Vereeniging in the Transvaal. Mawu, too, was beginning to organise in the area, and the EAWU branch developed a respect for its way of working, accountable to the membership through mandates and report-backs in order to ensure worker control of the union. It clashed with the Springs head office by accusing it of laziness, and in 1981 general secretary Calvin Nkabinde dismissed Vaal officials, who joined Mawu, taking the branch executive with them. Meanwhile Nkabinde had brought EAWU into Fosatu in 1979 on its formation. But he often refused to implement Fosatu policy and was critical of its white leaders, and in 1982 EAWU was expelled from the federation. This enabled Mawu’s Vaal branch to recruit widely and win recognition in former EAWU factories.⁷¹

These ex-Tucsa unions brought a distinctive tradition to Numsa which would contribute significantly to its organising methods, bargaining choices and administrative style.