‘last in, first out’ system to prevent the victimisation of unionists. Further demands were the payment of all outstanding leave and pension pay, and a month’s wages for each year of service. Companies were asked to maintain lists of the retrenched, who had first option on future job opportunities.28
In 1981, Mawu used the strike weapon on at least 11 occasions over retrenchments. Krost Brothers in Heriotdale, for example, was hit by a four-day stoppage after ‘the managers just walked out of the room’ when shop stewards raised the issue of severance pay.29 The company saw reason and agreed to negotiate.30 The union also used the industrial court, or the threat of court action, to force consultation over redundancies. For example, after a Mawu court challenge Deutz Diesel in Pietermariztburg agreed to pay R6 500 each to retrenchees and to re-employ them if vacancies arose.31
Professor Nicholas Wiehahn whose recommendations on the government appointed Wiehahn Commission changed the face of labour relations (W Matlala)
Through Fosatu, Mawu also built loyalty among migrants by fighting to protect and improve their labour rights. The federation objected strenuously to proposed legislation which excluded contract workers from registered unions. The unions were well aware of government’s divide and rule strategy whereby certain workers would be granted union rights and the right to reside in urban areas, whilst migrant workers would be forced back into homelands to provide a reserve army of labour. In 1979, the government gave way on the issue.32
Exploiting Wiehahn laws
The Wiehahn reforms (three Acts passed between 1979 and 1981) offered a bridge of micro-political opportunity for the unions, catapulting migrant workers from a condition of profound vulnerability to one of comparative security. State recognition eased the fear that many Africans felt about joining unions, while registration opened the way for unions to sign recognition agreements which entrenched protection against arbitrary dismissal.
The new laws allowed the unions to break cover: no more recruiting behind bushes outside factories as ‘Baba Kay’ Makama described33 or in secret cells in company departments. Mawu now had the legal right to recruit, which shielded it from state attack. A Highveld Steel shop steward described how the union grew in the early 1980s: ‘After Wiehahn … it decriminalised things. I’d recruit a few and then the rest would play the wait and see game. Then someone was dismissed and these guys waited to see what the union would do. We went for the appeal and won. After that the stop order forms were coming in left and right.’34 Fanaroff describes the employers’ change of heart: ‘Once the law changed employers suddenly thought they had to talk to us … employers for about a year weren’t quite sure how to deal with us. Some of them went over the other way, they were so accommodating, after refusing to talk to us for years!’
Mawu capitalised on the new organising space and focused on organising workers on the East Rand, the hub of the metal industry. Partly because of the Wiehahn reforms, it made the strategic decision to move away from painstaking company-by-company recruitment to mass organisation. It recognised the strategic importance of the hostels to recruitment: hostels, designed as a control mechanism, ironically provided ideal targets because they herded together large concentrations of workers – the Vosloosrus hostel on the East Rand, for example, housed 15 000 men. A former inmate, Makhoba, remarked on the effectiveness of hostel meetings: ‘We share our experiences, and the victories and defeats in one factory become lessons for a large number of people.’35 Central to the East Rand drive was Moses Mayekiso, a fired Toyota worker leader who became an organiser in 1979.
Mawu organiser Moses (Moss) Mayekiso (Numsa)
Growing inter-union rivalry fuelled the recruitment drive. In the early 1980s, Saawu and Macwusa, the political Eastern Cape general unions, arrived in the Transvaal. They staged huge meetings where workers from different factories were urged to join the union to fight off apartheid and their capitalist oppressors. Thousands joined. Mawu was impressed and unnerved. Said Fanaroff: ‘I was convinced the new unions would come up to the Transvaal and take our members. They organised through community meetings and I argued that we could do something similar.’36 He describes Mawu’s counter-thrust:
At Wilgespruit we decided we would out-organise Saawu using their tactics. So instead of using their tactic of mass rallies in the township and signing everyone up, we would move away from the factories …we’ll stay factory-based, but we’ll now organise in the hostels. So Moss [Mayekiso] would tell workers he was coming to a Katlehong hostel and then organise everyone in that factory from the hostel. So Moss was one of the most powerful figures in the hostels – we really controlled the Vosloosrus hostels, Katlehong hostels, Daveyton, Wattville.
The Transvaal branch of Mawu began by holding general meetings in Kwesine Hostel, but unlike the rallies of Saawu and Macwusa, which were often attended by students and the unemployed, it invited workers only. Eventually, up to 9 000 workers were attending Mawu rallies on the East Rand.37 Mayekiso recalls: ‘We used to meet the guys outside the compound and explain to them about the union … After that we went into the compound secretly and signed up people. I would visit them in their rooms and managed to get 600 members in this way.’38 Thereafter migrants mainly joined in groups, recruited by fellow workers, or organisers in the hostels. In Durban, the union adopted the same tactic, although Erwin remarked dismissively: ‘We never feared them [the general unions]; they looked far too much like us in the seventies.’39
A further incentive to mass recruitment was the fear that once the government lost faith in the Wiehahn reforms controlling unions, it would move to smash them. There was safety in numbers.
Another strategic shift involved the rapid organisation of large plants by organisers who told workers they could only put demands to management with majority support. ‘We were going through factories of more than a thousand in a week,’ Erwin recalls.40 Because of its emphasis on shop-floor strength, Mawu was able to retain members in a way that the general unions could not. Recruitment and organisation acquired a life of its own, as Adler remembers:
In the seventies we were more externally based, because we didn’t have the internal organisation, people and contacts and we were fewer. So we would do a lot of work at the gates and off factory premises. In the eighties we were bigger and had more factories. You couldn’t be at twenty factories on an afternoon to recruit, and the fear factor was less, and you had more organisation, and we’d get shop stewards to meet workers at home in the township, or pop along at lunchtime to the factory next door. That happened in Benoni industrial sites. It started to get a momentum of its own, that would occur at the level of disputes, you’d have someone to help so it started to be a lot more based in the factories.
To register or not
Union registration under the Wiehahn laws deepened the divide between Fosatu and other emerging unions. In the late 1970s, when the government threatened to exclude migrants, all emerging unions united in spurning registration but after government dropped this threat and many employers still refused to recognise unregistered unions, Fosatu decided to break ranks. After successfully polling its members, Numarwosa was the first to apply for registration.41 However, registration remained anathema to some radical Cape unions, including the African Food and Canning Workers Union, Saawu, Macwusa and, most notably, the Western Province General Workers Union (WPGWU). They argued that registration meant state control and, by placing decisions in the hands of officials, it forced unions to operate bureaucratically. The WPGWU believed that registration ‘spells the death knell of workers’ control
