Adler, ‘that the stewards made the tactical decision to let the strike go because I felt it was the only way we could get BM to change their position and this was correct.’ After a ten-day lock-out, 1 500 strikers returned en masse – but they had made their point. Renewed wage talks led to increases of between 33c to 50c an hour, bringing the minimum to R2,73 per hour.14 The company had finally conceded that Naawu spoke for its workforce.
The new Transvaal branch had shown a tactical understanding in the game of power akin to its counterparts in the Eastern Cape. Adler commented that Naawu’s experienced national organisation was an important prop in disputes of this kind, ‘There was a level of organisational capacity which was admirable, so in the situation at BMW there were discussions in the union about it. There was a management committee at the provincial and national level where these issues were discussed.’ The union’s sophistication in countering the resistance of a large German multinational raised its profile and extended its influence deep into the fabric of the auto sector. Oganisation spread rapidly and between 1981 and 1984 six new branches were formed.15 Owing to the size of assembly plants, Naawu established a branch in each company it organised.
Naawu’s expansion had assailed the fragmented apartheid state. It built a national union which had challenged the state’s cheap labour policies by protecting exploited black labour. As a previously coloured union, it had also built the unity of auto workers across apartheid’s ethnic barriers.
Expansion in metal engineering
The East Rand strikes of the early 1980s strained Mawu’s resources to the limit. The union could have responded by restricting growth, as it had in the 1970s, but the surge in worker interest gave it less and less control over recruiting networks. The Wiehahn laws had created a new confidence and workers actively sought out the union. Their optimism infected organisers with the vast opportunities available. As Fanaroff wryly observed, ‘We were opportunists, we were going to control the world, control the universe.’16 He recalled, ‘Moss used to get people marching across the veld to [Mawu’s] offices just outside Katlehong. They’d come and say: We’re on strike what do we do next? So they’d join up – 300 people at a go – then they’d sign them all overnight and go on strike. I remember Haggie had a strike like this.’ Unionists were experiencing the first heady taste of power, and industrial unions, once a theory, were now a real prospect.
Union expansion took different forms but it was seldom a strategised executive decision. A decision to organise a new area was usually a response to an approach by workers in areas such as Brits, Witbank and Richards Bay. The strategy was to focus on organising the largest and most influential factory and, as engineering firms were often the largest employers in an area, Naawu and Mawu frequently pioneered the unionisation of new industrial zones. Recruitment drives across a new zone had the added advantage of allowing for solidarity action in disputes from other Fosatu members.
Organising drives into new areas eroded important apartheid constructs. Mawu attacked the divisive bantustan system and its associated ‘deconcentrated’ industrial areas where the state sought to establish industrial bases in impoverished ethnic homelands which would provide employment and legitimise its divide and rule strategy. In this way it hoped to divest itself of the responsibility for these overpopulated areas whilst ensuring that a plentiful supply of cheap labour was available to the rest of South Africa.
Expansion into northern Natal
Union struggles in rural towns such as Richards Bay and Brits took on a distinct character because although workers were extremely vulnerable, they could draw on the support of small, cohesive communities.
In northern Natal, Mawu used an innovative organisational combination. It continued to put shop stewards and their training at the centre of organisation but it followed a form of general unionism in which community meetings played an important role in winning shop floor rights.
June-Rose Nala (now Hartley), a Mawu general secretary and later northern Natal branch secretary, commented on workers’ high levels of self-sufficiency and initiative in driving organisation in Richards Bay. As Nala was the only Fosatu organiser in the area, the strategy made good sense. She was sent to Richards Bay by the Mawu executive in 1981, and she immediately focused on training factory leaders and building efficient administrative systems in the branch office. After basic input, workers took over the organisation of individual factories.17 The aim was to unionise the whole area, as a worker at the Alusaf aluminium smelter, Jeffrey Vilane recalls: ‘It is not enough within Richards Bay to be just one company. There was Triomf. As soon as they came we started organising them, and then we started also organising others. At that time there was a general union that was taking every worker until they were strong in the factory and then we put them into their union. Our goal was to shift the whole of Richards Bay.’18
Fosatu workers at a rally six months after the launch of the Northern Natal branch (Wits archives)
Nala did not enter virgin territory as there had been pockets of union activity in Richards Bay since the early 1970s. In 1972, non-union workers at Alusaf had struck over wages, and a year later they joined the newly launched Mawu. The company, however, insisted that worker-management dealings should be conducted through a liaison committee. In May 1980 workers at a number of Richards Bay factories, including Alusaf, approached Fosatu for organising assistance, and Mawu elected to launch a northern Natal branch.19 Mawu’s decision embraced the expansion of Fosatu to the Richards Bay/Empangeni area where other affiliates had also started organising. In November 1980, 350 workers launched the Mawu office and branch.20 Nala had previously visited the area as part of a Fosatu delegation and now, in 1981, she returned as northern Natal branch secretary to be met with ‘a lot of willingness and excitement that we’d come.’
Alusaf was the obvious organising platform, but management’s response was to invite SABS, affiliated to Tusca, to recruit its African employees. Workers, however, were keen to join Mawu and in less than a year, 365 of Alusaf’s 1 100 workforce had joined.21 After shop stewards demanded recognition, management agreed to meet the union, grant stop-order facilities and consult stewards. A shop steward described workers’ response:
There was a big change in their attitudes … every worker is united, not fighting each other. They sing freedom songs … they are now used to attending meetings … everyone will sit and listen to the meeting and ask good questions … They’re learning their own power. If there’s something happening in another department, they used to feel this is none of my business. But now they know … they must care, because in future it’s coming to him.’22
Alusaf operated as a launching pad ‘to shift the whole of Richards Bay’. Every factory in Richards Bay became a target, and the painstaking factory-by-factory consolidation which marked earlier organisation in southern Natal in areas such as New Germany, Pinetown, Mobeni, and Jacobs was abandoned. Alusaf leaders began recruiting through large meetings of workers from factories in the adjacent townships of Esikhawini and Nseleni, recalling the methods adopted on the East Rand in 1980. Alusaf shop stewards would have been aware of this recruitment tactic through visits from East Rand shop stewards such as Rodney Mwambo, from a Benoni factory, who had joined a Fosatu organising team at Richards Bay during his July leave in 1980. At rallies, the federation, its unions and their structures were introduced and workers agreed that union structures should replace liaison committees.23
Some at the Fosatu head office viewed the general union strategy with suspicion.24 But the national union upsurge and a more permissive climate brought by the East Rand strikes allowed Nala to plot her own course.
In
