and political activity is [sic] more tenuous than assumed’.18 He shows that the change in membership density was not marked with heightened political activity such as the repression in 1986 or the unbanning of political parties in 1990. He makes the important point that union growth was directly affected by micro political opportunities that were opened up on the factory floor. One of the attractions of the emerging unions was their role in giving black workers a voice, which apartheid denied them. For the metal workers of the East Rand, many of them migrants, union organisation brought a measure of control over the insecurity of their working lives threatened by job cuts and the whims of white foremen.
Mawu and migrant workers
Unlike workers in the Eastern Cape auto industry, those on the East Rand were mainly migrants. At Ford, for example, all African workers had Section 10 rights (under Section 10 of the Urban Bantu Areas Act, Africans could obtain rights to live in the city if they had worked in one company for ten unbroken years) and the Port Elizabeth branch of the National Automobile and Allied Workers’ Union (Naawu) had no migrant members. In comparison, Mawu members on the East Rand had much less bargaining power. As a Transvaal organiser of Naawu, Taffy Adler, noted:
Component worker operating a moulding machine (Lesley Lawson)
In the Transvaal both Mawu and Naawu [Numarwosa’s successor] organised African workers but in Mawu it was often migrant based. Motor workers in Naawu were generally urban based … people who lived in Brits and the homelands who would commute for a couple of hours a day [from places] like Soshanguve and rural townships in Bop [Bophuthatswana], Mamelodi, Atteridgeville.
Originally in Mawu we organised the big steel processing plants – this is a different type of person from the person who works in the electronic industry. In the early days of Mawu we were organising in foundries and workers there were poorly educated, low paid, migrants. In components, workers were urban (out of Pretoria townships) less educated and sophisticated than in the assembly plants but not as badly off as people in the foundries.19
The increase in black semi-skilled operatives opened the way for huge growth in African unionism, especially in the metal sector. In the early days, migrants doing manual work in heavy engineering formed the core of Mawu’s membership; they were later complemented by semi-skilled operators who joined factories in large numbers. Such workers, although not as strategically positioned as the Eastern Cape auto workers, nevertheless possessed a bargaining power which unskilled workers lacked.
It was these semi-skilled and unskilled migrant workers who became the backbone of Mawu. In the beginning, few of the new African urban workers joined unions such as Mawu. Most who joined had roots in the Transvaal and Natal countryside. According to Mawu’s Fanaroff:
Almost all workers were migrant workers, that was characteristic of the union in the early days. Some, as at Kraft Engineering, lived in Alexandra or Soweto but all of them saw themselves as temporary in the towns … even when they had lived all their lives in the towns. Like these guys Isaac Modise and Ledwaba. Their ambition was to get enough money to buy a few cattle and then go back to Northern Transvaal. People felt they were here to provide for their families and they wanted to go back home. All people at that time were migrants in heavy engineering.20
Typically, migrants were driven from their villages by drought and the exhausted soil of the reserves. Recruited by the local labour bureau for a particular company, they were placed in jobs without training and would learn by imitating other workers. Only the most resilient survived; the ‘cheeky’ and ‘slow’ were quickly weeded out.21 Migrants entered annual contracts and travelled home at Christmas for two weeks before renewing them, often with the same company. Hours were long and the jobs badly paid and repetitive, often involving overtime and Saturday work.
Hostel with rudimentary toilet (Wits archives)
In the absence of company hostels, migrants registered at the Bantu Local Affairs Commissioner’s office and applied for single beds in single-sex hostels owned by township administration boards. Hostel rooms, shared by up to 16 migrants, were often squalid, noisy and devoid of privacy, with broken toilets and broken laundry facilities. Stealing, drunkenness and violence were commonplace. Describing the Vosloosrus hostel in 1980, one worker said: ‘the last time the hostel was cleaned was when it was built [in 1963] … there is no repairer. There is no person who represents people’s grievances. The only person is the superintendent whose major concern is the money at the end of the month.’22 Hostel fees were raised without consultation or improvements to facilities.23
In the factories, skilled jobs were reserved for white, coloured and Indian artisans, and it was a source of bitterness that African migrants were often required to train white newcomers. Migrants were often supervised by the detested black ‘baas[boss]-boys’ or indunas, who answered to white foremen, the first line of management. Hourly-paid blacks and weekly-paid whites were kept on separate payrolls, with wide variations in pay rates and benefits. They used separate changing rooms, canteens, toilets and washrooms – up to 1983, this was legislated in the Factories Act but it continued in practice for many years thereafter.
The workplace was a place of power for whites through their racially biased interaction with blacks, reinforced by workplace institutions. Employers preferred migrants because they viewed them as more submissive, loyal, reliable and hard-working than local residents, and more amenable to overtime. Township dwellers were indeed more reluctant to take on heavy, dirty work, and this, ironically, gave unskilled migrants the little bargaining power they had.
White power was often arbitrarily exercised and lines of managerial authority were unclear to workers. Africans were seen as servants and any white could give instructions, which might be unrelated to the workplace. Baaskap was maintained through fear of dismissal, verbal abuse, assault and wage cuts. Initiative and self-assertion were punished. A metal worker commented: ‘Our employers don’t treat us like human beings … because they know that as soon as they expel you, you would lose a place of residence, because you would not be able to pay for the hostel fees without the money which they provide. And the pass office will instruct you to go back where you come from.’24
Migrants were common in the labour force in the early 1980s. For example, at Scaw Metals, the largest metal factory on the East Rand, unskilled migrants constituted 70 per cent of the workforce, and semi-skilled workers 20 per cent whilst white skilled artisans comprised the remaining 10 per cent.25
It was on the racially super-exploited group of migrants that Mawu focussed its organising initiatives in the 1970s and early 1980s.26 The union initially won their trust by campaigning around migrant contracts and lack of work security, also defending workers who were threatened with the termination of contracts because of union activism. As an ex-Mawu unionist from the Highveld region recalls: ‘Slowly all workers got united. If they didn’t renew a contract and workers knew it was victimisation they would unite to take action – it was almost like fighting a dismissal.’27 In 1981, as recession set in and employment losses mounted, Mawu’s fight to protect migrants’ jobs further reinforced their loyalty. In 1982 the union launched a campaign for retrenchment negotiations in all its East Rand factories.
In this complex area, Naawu had paved the way, and following Naawu’s lead Fosatu drew up retrenchment guidelines. The first step was to win job security by demanding a freeze on recruitment, training in new techniques or work, a shorter working week, an end to overtime and staggered unpaid leave. Companies were asked to engage shop stewards on forms of cost-cutting. When retrenchments were inevitable,
