in on the state’s incentive, B&S moved from Johannesburg to Brits in 1969. The business manufactured steel furniture and was making good profits. Its net income after taxation rose steadily, from 6,7 per cent in 1979 to 14,2 per cent in 1981, and it was ranked third in the Sunday Times Top 100 Companies in 1981.44 It employed 900, mainly women workers who commuted long distances from the dry, overcrowded villages and resettlement camps of Bophuthatswana to earn as little as R196 a month. Women were in the lowest wage categories and were paid significantly less than men in the same jobs.45 Workers complained of physical assaults, verbal abuse, searches of their persons and belongings, lack of safety equipment and a complete absence of communication with management.46
Contacted by youthful activists from the Young Christian Workers (YCW) in the area, Mawu began organising B&S in 1982 and soon won over 70 per cent of the workforce. Adler recalled the YCW contribution: ‘Exceptional people who flourish in that small environment [Oukasie, the township neighbouring Brits]. Its leadership was exceptionally strong and deep-rooted and that partly goes back to the early involvement of many of those leaders in YCW which was there before the unions and developed this core of leadership who moved into the unions and politics and the community.’47 Two of the activists, David Modimoeng and Peter Dantjies, were destined to make a large contribution to the union. ‘I came into union matters through the YCW,’ explained Dantjies. ‘There were about seven or eight of us that were selected in Brits. They formed just small leadership groups and we learnt all about trade unions and worker issues through them. There was a Roman Catholic hall in Brits that we used a lot.’48 Dantjies began raising union awareness among workers at the Brits fridge components factory, Femco, which he joined after leaving school. He urged workers not to work until a dismissed colleague was reinstated, and management locked him out. In a subsequent protest strike, Modimoeng was also fired. Factories in Brits blocked their employment and so they became union activists.49
Despite Mawu’s majority in the factory, B&S refused to recognise it and tried to identify union members by recruiting shop stewards as spies. It told workers that they were fools to join the union because it could not pay them and they ‘would not go far with the factory’.50 When this failed, the company sacked the entire shop stewards committee on the pretext that it needed to retrench. The committee was reinstated after a strike, but the company stonewalled recognition. A date was finally set for the discussion of grievances, but a few days beforehand, in September 1982, management fired the Mawu vice-chairman and switched off machines. Workers were told that the factory would be closed for three days, and that all 900 were dismissed and could apply for selective re-employment.51
About 300 Mawu members gathered outside the factory to demand a return to work but they were replaced by those who accepted selective re-employment and unemployed labour from Brits and Bophuthatswana.52 The new workforce was recruited through a labour bureau with ‘the power to discriminate against and blacklist workers’, and it was claimed in a subsequent court case that ‘companies in the area, united through the employers association, influenced the local administration board to prevent union members being employed elsewhere in the Brits industrial complex’.53
Despite the apparent hopelessness of their position, the 300 dismissed union members fought on. They faced a very different adversary from that confronting the trial of strength strikers at VW a year earlier. B&S was a small family business in which members of the Back family behaved as a law unto themselves. Workers could not appeal to a parent company or outside union movement, nor to other workplaces in unorganised Brits. Back family members felt personally affronted by the disloyalty of the strikers, Adler described their attitude:
The conditions were terrible and the management was paternalistic … they recruited all their domestics from B&S workers or family of B&S workers. But the mother of one of the strikers was a domestic in the family’s house in Johannesburg and the family would talk, so we were getting these nightly reports as to what was going to happen in the factory the next morning. It was a great intelligence system. And the family was really hurt by these people turning on them – they’ve been there for years, they taught them everything they knew, how could they bite the hand that fed them? At times it got quite dangerous; in particular the one son was a bit mentally unbalanced and had a gun and he drew that in discussions at the gate.
Mawu knew that strike solidarity was the key as a long dispute would deplete workers’ resources and family pressures could result in falling morale. The shop stewards committee became the instrument for sustaining unity and solving workers’ daily problems. Mawu’s Transvaal branch was under severe pressure from the East Rand strikes, so Naawu gave stewards support where it could. A member of the B&S shop stewards committee gave a heart-rending account of how members managed:
Some of us had savings and we lived on these and also shared them out. Also people in the community were initially willing to help us out, as well as some of the other workers in the area. We decided that people should report every day … We began discussing how we were harassed by management, and how workers in other factories were also harassed … we would take examples of people’s experiences and get workers to talk and comment. We discovered that if we want to survive here we will have to stick together, as this will be the only way to keep the organisation strong. If we depart, then it would all break up and people would be weak if they were alone. We spent a lot of time asking people how they felt about the dismissal – whether they thought it was unfair – finally we all agreed it was unfair and we all decided to stick together.
We discovered it was possible to motivate the people, and not to separate ourselves from one another by being Xhosa or Tswanas, finding that each and every one of us is useful to the others … by sharing information and our feelings about the situation in the factory, the bad conditions … this type of discussion helped a lot because it showed people that if they went to another factory, the situation would be exactly the same …
The committee planned to get help from the local churches. We got all the people involved in this by asking each one of them to take a letter to the church in their area. We also planned to get help from other workers in the area. We had no idea we would be out for so long … there were a few problems when we started getting money from outside as some of the workers did not trust that they were going to benefit – they thought that the money would just go to the committee. This led to a lot of discussions where we explained exactly how the money was going to be used. We explained that we were all in the struggle. Some of us had real problems with transport, and some of the money went into making sure that those who wanted to come to the hall, could. One day I would come, and the next my neighbour would.
B&S strike meeting in a Brits church hall. L-R Bosch shop steward Levy Mamabolo flanked by Mawu organiser Peter Dantjies on his right
There were some problems especially emergencies; people who could not pay for treatment, kids who were sick. The way we dealt with this was to all come together and make a contribution from our savings … also the committee found that people were complaining that their families were putting them under a lot of pressure, telling them to go back to work. The problem is that some of us are the only member of the family with a full-time job and consequently the families had to make sacrifices for this struggle. This is why we are so close now. We would send a few of the committee members to talk to the whole family and explain the struggle and what it was all about.
Each day we report what we have heard about the factory – you see many friends were working there and they tell us exactly what is going on. Sometimes the workers would ask where the organisers were and whether they had forgotten us, as they did not come here very often. We had to explain that they were very busy and that they were proceeding with the industrial council and the court case. When two committee members were arrested under the Intimidation Act, and the charges later withdrawn, this gave us faith in the union
