particular, Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. The uprising marked the reappearance of the ANC on the South African political horizon, as thousands of youngsters fled to neighbouring countries and were recruited into its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe.12 The children of the Soweto riots were also the workers of tomorrow and from the late 1970s onwards a wave of politically conscious students entered the labour force. They were to be highly responsive to union organising drives.
Durban strikers in 1973 (unknown)
In response to the growth in union organisation and the mobilisation of black youth, a generation of reformers, guided by new prime minister, PW Botha, emerged in the Nationalist government. In Botha’s government the South African Defence Force (SADF) played a significant policy making role; on its instigation Botha pursued a ‘total strategy’ and reform programme in response to an ostensible ‘total onslaught’. The strategy aimed to reduce foreign pressure on apartheid, remove the Marxist ANC from South Africa’s borders, and promote a black middle class to counter radical township activity. On the labour front, the Riekert and Wiehahn Commissions were appointed to investigate the pass laws and labour legislation respectively. The 1979 Riekert Report recommended that the African population be divided into urban ‘insiders’ with residence rights and homeland ‘outsiders’. Simultaneously, the Wiehahn Commission recommended that Africans be brought into the statutory industrial relations system and that job reservation be scrapped. In 1979, the minister of labour abolished job reservation – except in mining – and metal employers and the white unions agreed to end closed shop agreements barring Africans from certain grades of work.13 These commissions would critically alter the apartheid landscape of the 1980s.
Against this upheaval and change, Numsa’s predecessors, each with its own history and traditions, began organising coloured, Indian and African workers. For those organising Africans, the obstacles were the greatest but for those organising coloured and Indian workers the challenge was to forge non-racial solidarity with Africans.
Independent: Metal and Allied Workers Union
The Numsa that emerged in the 1980s was a hybrid of interwoven traditions, and the Metal and Allied Workers Union (Mawu) contributed one of its distinctive strands.
Workers of the time recall the harsh conditions under which they toiled. A woman worker from a kitchenware factory, Prestige, in Pietermaritzburg, remembers pressing out metal objects in a physically demanding, repetitive, hot and noisy workplace. There were no safety regulations, no earplugs, gloves, overalls or fans to counter the heat. The women started at 7.30 am and ended at 10.30 pm, and earned very low wages. Dismissal without explanation, including because of pregnancy, was common. Pay rises were arbitrarily based on ‘merit’. Commented one worker: ‘When the boss liked you, he gave you an increase.’14 Levy Mamabolo, a Bosch shop steward, recollects that dismissals were a way of life. ‘You could not see a worker for a while, then meet him on the street: “I haven’t seen you, are you still on night shift?” He would answer, “I was dismissed a few weeks ago.”’15 Samuel Mthethwa, a Dunlop worker, remembers: ‘That white man, he could do anything to you. If he felt like hitting you, he hit you. In those days any white man could give you instructions. This meant you had to be in three different places at the same time and you could be dismissed for failing.’16
For Mawu the 1970s was a struggle for survival. That the union survived and grew was in large measure due to the hard work, tenacity and strategic thinking of its early organisers. In 1971 a University of Natal lecturer, David Hemson, together with white students from the National Union of South African Students’ wages commission, and registered unions in the mainstream Trade Union Council of South Africa (Tucsa), established the General Factory Workers Benefit Fund (GFWBF) in Durban. It administered benefits for workers and provided a forum for the discussion of factory problems. In this way the GFWBF brought white intellectuals into regular contact with African workers. The 1973 strikes led to a worker influx to the GFWBF, and members in Durban and Pietermaritzburg linked up. Pietermaritzburg members, who had a number of Sactu organisers in their ranks, were soon demanding the launch of a metal union that would focus exclusively on their problems. In April 1973, Mawu was launched with 200 members from two factories, Alcon and Scottish Cables. Mawu was the first of the new non-racial, national industrial unions to be launched in South Africa and consisted of these two branches.17
Mawu logo
David Hemson recruiting in the early days on the bonnet of his car in the absence of local offices (unknown)
Fierce debate went into the formation of unions like Mawu, and the principles and strategies that emerged underpinned these unions in the future. The Natal-based unionists had developed a strategic vision which had been sharpened by contact with coloured industrial unions in the Western and Eastern Cape. Central to their strategy was that only an accumulation of worker power could bring meaningful change. Their abhorrence of racism and their socialist sympathies led them to a long-term vision of a united working class in a democratic South Africa (non-racialism meant that unions were open to all workers, but in practice Africans made up the mass of members). Also central to their vision was the formation of industrial unions where a strong worker unity and identity could be forged: workers would initially press for power in their factories; then, through the development of a working class consciousness, they would come to identify with workers across their industry; the next step would be a union federation and the exercise of joint power with workers from other sectors and, indeed, with workers across the globe.
These unionists rejected the approach of the general unions which arose in the early 1980s, with their vague agenda of working class solidarity and strong identification with political causes. Instead they opted for the slow building of power in specific sectors. The Natal unionists observed that general unions had difficulty mobilising workers beyond their local communities and that this hampered the building of worker solidarity, and of national power, in a sector of the economy with which workers identified. The South African Allied Workers Union (Saawu), for example, which also organised metalworkers in the early 1980s, organised through rallies rather than in factories (in this method lay the seeds of its downfall – lacking depth of organisation in the factories, Saawu, like Sactu before it, was badly weakened by a state crackdown on its leaders).18 Mawu first established an organisational presence in a factory, recruited members and then built an accountable leadership which evolved into a shop stewards committee. In contrast with Tucsa’s bureaucratic unionism, workers’ control was paramount. As Mawu (and later Numsa) organiser Bernie Fanaroff recalls:
Everything was workers’ control. Everything had to be discussed at a general meeting. The shop stewards would not take decisions without going back to a general meeting. We pushed hard for shop stewards to discuss things with their own department at lunchtime and then meet as a shop stewards committee in the factory. This made workers feel that they owned the union, which was another thing we insisted on – organisers don’t own the union, workers own the union. And the result was that workers didn’t feel that gap between organisers and members and demand things from the organisers. If they couldn’t win things, they saw it as their problem.19
Early shop stewards two of whom became organisers on dismissal. L-R Baba K (Nehemia) Makama and Peet Pheku from the Transvaal, and Pietermaritzburg branch secretary, John Makatini (W Matlala)
