union organisers, and explained that:
We took the decision that the way to organise was to get the workers to go out at lunchtime and organise all the other factories in the area and to help workers who were on strike because Moss couldn’t do everything. That was where it started … It started with Henred (Fruehauf) who went through the whole process – liaison committee, strike etcetera. There was a chap called (Johnson) Nonjeke and Ramodile especially in the leadership there. They were very active and Moss used them as his organisers and that was the first local. A Henred worker owned a car which took shop stewards to other plants to recruit during lunch hour.
The Katlehong local created sub-committees to organise one street at a time, and by the end of 1982, 23 factories, with shop stewards representing 7 000 workers, had joined the union.68 Shop stewards also began educating and recruiting on trains, in hostels, shebeens and township meetings. Mawu organiser Dumisane Mbanjwa recalls that ‘once you achieved something in one plant, the plant next door a few kilometres down the road would hear about that. There would be a flow of communication between the two plants and then you would move in and organise that plant, and then the same thing would happen again.’69
Henred Fruehauf shop stewards meeting (Bernie Fanaroff)
In this way, Mawu created a powerful grassroots movement and the Katlehong local became the centre of working class activity. Initially three shop steward office bearers were elected, all from Mawu, but by 1982 four office-bearer positions had been created, two held by Mawu and two by the Chemical Workers Industrial Union.
The 90 stewards in the local met every two weeks and between meetings when the chairs of shop stewards committees held planning meetings to discuss organising progress, plan the agenda and take emergency decisions. The local was divided into areas to keep track of recruiting drives. Commented Mawu organiser, Richard Ntuli: ‘These area committees were strong. In Wadeville there were three or four factories in Wadeville south, and then there was Wadeville centre, and that was another area committee. They elected their own chairperson and secretaries and they would report what happened at different companies.’
One of the councils’ important responsibilities was to build worker solidarity across factories and industries. An executive member explained: ‘We must have a Fosatu local to bring workers together, to make common decisions and to control what’s happening in that certain area. Workers are encouraged to see beyond their own union to the struggle of the workers as a whole.’70 For the first time, workers began to draw up collective demands on industry-wide matters, such as how to fight the metal industrial council agreement and tackle unemployment. Mawu’s first joint shop stewards council, the Witwatersrand Shop Stewards Council, attended by 230 stewards from 66 factories, formulated a platform on retrenchments and urged Seifsa members to halt inhumane job cuts.71 Seifsa responded by drawing up guidelines for retrenchment procedures, but insisted that retrenchment was not an issue for plant negotiations and advised its members that negotiations should take place at the industrial council alone.72
A Mawu shop stewards council meeting in the Transvaal (Wits archives)
Workers across the country watched the Katlehong local with intense interest and the idea spread rapidly. ‘Shop stewards councils are playing an increasingly important role in Fosatu,’ reported Fosatu Worker News in May 1982. ‘In many areas, they are taking the lead in organisational drives and are the main forums for discussing important policy issues.’ The Springs local was formed in August 1981,73 and others sprang up in Benoni, Uitenhage, Brits, Pretoria, Elandsfontein and Richard’s Bay, often spearheading organisation in areas before individual union branches were formed.
Soon different councils in an area were getting together. In Mawu, this inspired stewards to bring together workers from sub-sectors, such as the foundries, and to link worker representatives from the same company in different parts of the country in ‘combine committees’.74 In 1982 shop stewards from Henred Freuhauf plants in Driehoek, Wadeville, Pinetown and Isithebe, all at different wage levels, set up a combined committee to coordinate wage talks across plants.
In July of the same year, 1980, Mawu began coordinating its entire Transvaal organisation through joint shop stewards council meetings. As a Katlehong council member explained: ‘We are faced with the problem of building solidarity amongst us. When we face a problem then they (the workers) must know it’s a struggle, not an insurance that I just come, and I am helped. Then to give them that understanding – that they are a certain class … that they have to fight …’75
The Katlehong shop stewards council was a practical and creative response to an organisational problem but its effectiveness reverberated far beyond an ingenious way of dealing with a capacity problem. It was a revolution in union organisation – the councils were organs of workers’ power. As Mayekiso explained: ‘The shop stewards council became the backbone of the union. The council became the place where the workers could feel their power – the slogan an “injury to one is an injury to all” became a reality there.’76 For the first time, workers were tasting working class power not merely through rapid growth in union numbers, but also by mobilising, discussing, sharing, resolving problems, formulating tactics and giving support and solidarity.
Imbongi Lawrence Zondi, a worker at BTR Sarmcol (Debbie Bonnin)
Education and union growth
Education was hugely important to the process of recruitment and of retaining membership in the early and mid-1980s. Some of it came through formal union structures, but much took place in a less didactic way. Workers were hungry for knowledge as a means of informing and transforming their oppressive conditions.
Sidney Tarrow comments that contention takes different forms which can be ‘inherited, rare, habitual or familiar, solitary or part of concerted campaigns’. He notes that groups have a memory of contentious forms. ‘Workers know how to strike because generations of workers struck before them.’77 In a study of how a collective ‘struggle’ consciousness evolved among BTR Sarmcol workers, Debbie Bonnin noted the educative power of the grassroots intellectual or ‘imbongi’ (praise poet). These intellectuals provided a bridge between the battles in the factory in the 1960s and later recruitment and recognition struggles in Mawu in the 1970s and 1980s. The imbongi Lawrence Zondi played the role of ‘sage, philosopher, poet, recorder and interpreter of history by consent of the rest of the community … and offered advice on the future.’78 He was the first to join Mawu at Sarmcol in 1974 and he drew in younger workers by ‘absorbing and intertwining individual experiences from the past with community experiences’ thereby welding together a ‘common history’.79 This continuity between past and present was important in shaping younger workers’ consciousness. Zondi, and a number of older workers, told stories of strikes waged by the Rubber and Cable Union,80 a Sactu affiliate, where workers successfully won protective clothing and wage increases in 1961.
Greg Ruiters contends that ‘On the East Rand the thread of continuity between the East Rand ANC activists of the 1950s and the radicals of the 1980s had withered. In the 1970s black consciousness ideas were on the rise attracting thousands of militants … the imprint of the 1950s was not discernable.’81 Yet it would seem that the role of grassroots intellectuals at Sarmcol was not an isolated one. There are many stories on the East Rand of workers being influenced by the testimonies of older workers from the ANC/Sactu and PAC traditions. Ruiters appears to be supporting what
