the late 1800s, labour has loomed large in the history of industrial South Africa, and in the desire to control the movement of labour to urban areas lay the seeds of apartheid. By 1948, when the National Party took the reins of government, the foundations had already been laid for an economic and political system which allowed for white-controlled capitalism to flourish by extracting superprofits from black labour. Over the years, from the early twentieth century, black workers had made many attempts to organise, and they fought some impressive battles, but it was only in the 1980s that their unions came to wield genuine power, and to offer real protection to people like Makhoba.
In the early 1980s, when this account begins, a small politically independent section of the trade union movement blossomed. It reinstated the dignity of labour in fundamental ways and at times it dominated the political landscape. In the struggle to transform the apartheid workplace, and ultimately the apartheid state, certain unions emerged as potent forces for change, pioneering organising policies and methods which greatly bolstered worker organisation. The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) and its predecessors were some of these. Numsa affected thousands of workers’ lives, organised and unorganised, as well as the lives of huge numbers of people in black communities, and many employers.
This is not a history from the employers’ or from the government’s perspective. It is a history teeming with human rights abuses which white business would prefer to be forgotten. It is an account of a crucial phase in the development of the metal and engineering unions, written from their point of view.
It is rare to find an account of a single trade union which examines how it built and used power. This book sets out to do that. By focusing on the combined themes of power, independence and workers’ control and democracy, it analyses how these unions, which ultimately became one, were able to make a significant contribution to change in South Africa. It traces the development of Numsa and its forebears from the early 1980s through to 1995, a year after South Africa’s first democratic elections, and looks at them as seats of innovation in the broader labour movement.
Numsa spanned a range of pivotal manufacturing sectors and was divided into three industrial sectors: engineering, auto and the motor industry more generally. Each one of these accrued power differently while they were simultaneously guided by national union policies.
By the early 1980s, many of Numsa’s main strategies had been formulated by two of its predecessors, the National Union of Motor Assembly and Rubber Workers of South Africa (Numarwosa) and the Metal and Allied Workers Union (Mawu) under the umbrella of the Trade Union Advisory Coordinating Committee (Tuacc). Numsa’s most significant predecessors in the 1970s had a strong impact on its later way of operating – and its hybrid tradition contributed to the growth of its power and to its weaknesses.
Its predecessors took the important decision not to confront the state as a revolutionary force, as was advocated by South African liberation movements. Instead, they chose to build power incrementally by adopting an independent and disciplined approach which rested on strong factory structures rooted in democratic accountability.
Numsa, and indeed the union movement, achieved tremendous gains in the 1980s in both the workplace and in society at large in alliance with popular political organisations. By 1989 it was poised to wield significant power for the country and for the future of the union movement. To end here, however, would be to discard the reason why Numsa built power in the first place: to overturn both apartheid and capitalist economic relations. Looking further into the early 1990s allows for an exploration of how Numsa chose to wield its influence in favour of working class power during the transition to democracy, a transition that ushered in many challenges for the powerful union movement where it now had to engage in a contested terrain fraught with complex questions and problems. By this time a greater sense of the limitations to its bold vision had become apparent.
Martin describes unions as ‘institutions which are thought of as wielding great power – or, at least, significant repositories of power’.2 But ‘power’ is a complex idea. Macun suggests that in the South African labour context, it has generally been seen as little more than the capacity to oppose. Frequently, the term carries the damning undertones of domination and exploitation. In this book, the emphasis is on power as a force for creativity and emancipation. Numsa and its parent unions, especially Mawu, drew heavily on the ideas concerning union power, such as those of Antonio Gramsci and Rick Turner, discussed in the Appendix.3 These theoretical perspectives became a source of both power and contention, and were applied with varying degrees of success. Readers who wish to better understand some of the ideas underlying these unions’ approaches should read the Appendix, although the book can certainly be appreciated without it.
The pace of Numsa’s activities, and of its achievements in such a condensed period, was extraordinarily fast. Thus it is useful to break down the main themes and periods covered in this book as a guide to its logic. It should be noted that these themes sometimes overlap in time so the book may return, at times, to an earlier period that has already been covered under a different theme.
Chapters 1 to 5 (1980–1984) deal mainly with Numsa and its predecessors building local power through various organising strategies which include its early focus on organising the workplace and developing and educating shop stewards, committees and organisers. These chapters also spotlight strategies to increase membership aided by the Wiehahn laws which brought Africans into the industrial relations system, and by union mergers in different parts of the metal sector which aimed to organise workers nationally.
Chapters 6 to 8 (1983–1989) trace Numsa’s building of national bureaucratic bargaining and organisational power. The union streamlined its internal systems, enabling it to operate more efficiently and to stabilise its income. It controversially entered the national metal industrial council and through major industrial action became the most important bargaining partner in both the engineering and auto sectors. This allowed it to consider how to reshape its industries.
Chapters 9 to 15 (1989–1995) see a now powerful Numsa taking on the employers and winning substantial gains in both wage and non-wage areas. However, in a recessionary climate where its industries are declining and bleeding jobs, and after a disastrous national engineering strike, the union turns to developing and implementing an alternative vision. It now aims to create stable and predictable conditions to bolster the rebuilding of South Africa’s embattled metal sectors while attempting to raise pay and the social wage. This programme is flawed by tensions between national leaders and the factory floor and other faulty assumptions which some believed were an ideological cover for retrenchments.
Chapters 16 to 22 (1980–1995) deal with Numsa’s socialist politics, tracing its different political strands with an emphasis on its fierce independence and how this is compromised by political conditions in South Africa, including the outbreak of severe violence, and the nature of the alliances it forged.
Chapter One
Building local power: 1970s
‘I heard talk about how we had to fight for ourselves. This was all new to me but I was interested in what they were saying. They were preaching unity and power.’1 In these words, Moses Mayekiso recalled his first visit to the Metal and Allied Workers Union (Mawu) offices in the early 1970s. At the time, he had no idea that over the next twenty years ‘unity’ and ‘power’ would enable the union to transform thousands of South African workplaces and the apartheid landscape.
Numsa’s steady accumulation of power followed decades of relative powerlessness for African and coloured workers. In the 1970s, trade unions were not recognised by the National Party government and were excluded from the collective bargaining structures of the Industrial Conciliation Act and other labour laws. Capitalising on their shadowy status, many employers refused to deal with them. Working class power was also weakened, as it had been for half
