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Automobile conference bringing together Johnny Mke of Western WPMawu, Fred Sauls of Naawu, and James Campbell of Numarwosa (Wits archives)
Before 1967, coloured workers in auto and tyre companies were not organised. They were covered by the Industrial Conciliation Act which allowed for the formation of racially exclusive registered coloured unions which sat on the auto industrial council.39 An organiser was sent by Tucsa to form a coloured union in the auto industry and from these initiatives grew Numarwosa which was launched in 1967 with 4 500 members.40
In the early days, Numarwosa did not have a policy of building worker-controlled factory structures to promote internal democracy. When members had a grievance, they turned to Tucsa officials at the union office. ‘We were in a Tucsa frame of mind. But the loose committee structure in the plants slowly developed into something like a shop steward system,’ commented an early organiser, Fred Sauls.41 The union conducted little membership education and when factory committee members attended industrial council meetings they were often at sea. Sauls recalls:
We ended up in the IC without knowing the damn what we were doing there! Nobody had explained to us in the plant what the IC was all about … so we ended up in the council listening to what is happening, and afterwards we found out the agreement is being concluded. We go back to the workers, the workers ask, ‘What’s happening?’ We say we don’t know … I phoned the branch secretary and I said, ‘Look this is not the way things should operate.’ We started to question the things about accountability, what are the organisers doing? How are they accountable to the worker reps in the plant?42
At Ford, coloured union members singled out long-service workers who could stand up to the foreman. Over time, one or two workers in every department helped the organising committee to recruit. When the union had a substantial majority, it approached management, and by 1968 it was pressing management for recognition. Coloured workers also began to demand accountable organisers who were now required to provide a daily account of their whereabouts.43
From a base at Ford, GM and Rover, Numarwosa expanded to Volkswagen in Uitenhage. In 1970 it set up a national executive committee and joined Tucsa. Three years after its launch, Numarwosa had recruited a majority of coloured auto workers, and had established branches in Durban and East London. Branch executive members had resisted recruiting Africans, but when Sauls was elected branch secretary in 1971 he moved to include Africans and strengthen shop-floor structures. During the 1960s, office bearers had been elected in poorly attended meetings in a venue removed from factories, but now office bearers and shop stewards were elected on the factory floor and by 1979 the union could claim a presence in every major automobile and tyre company and had ‘hundreds of committee members, branch chairmen, vice-chairmen, shop stewards and shop committee members’.44 It also offered sickness, death, distress and retirement benefits. The union’s constitution barred shop stewards from meeting management alone and required them to report to members on any discussions with the company. Over time, shop stewards became the union stronghold and, as with Mawu, served as a leadership core for the union as a whole.45
Initially, Numarwosa wanted to organise Africans out of a concern for their impoverishment and because it believed racial divisions sapped worker power. Also at issue, however, was the union’s weakness on the industrial council, as Sauls explains:
We had representation on the industrial council although it was not effective. We realised that just having coloureds there to represent coloured interests is not going to effectively challenge management. So, we developed links with African workers in the plants. On the industrial council, management saw two groups of black workers – the coloureds represented by the national union on the one side, and the Africans represented by the Bantu Labour Office on the other. We did not feel satisfied just speaking for the Africans with them having no voice … to improve the conditions of workers, we needed a unified structure.46
Numarwosa first decided to approach Africans in late 1972, while it was still in Tucsa. To circumvent the law, it used the tactical device of forming UAW as a parallel to the white and coloured unions which were covered by industrial relations laws, but with amalgamation into one union as the long-term aim. In Tucsa, parallel coloured and African union leaders were appointed by the white union executive and they were neither developed nor encouraged as trade unionists. In a break from this practice, UAW’s members elected leaders to an independent executive and sat with Numarwosa on a joint advisory committee.47 It is not often acknowledged that the independent UTP (Urban Training Project) associated with Tucsa also played a role in UAW’s early formation. Numarwosa and UTP assisted in the launch of UAW, and in 1975 UTP helped to establish a Pretoria branch and trained Dorah Nowatha to become an organiser. A UTP organiser, Michael Faya, became UAW’s first national secretary in 1974.48
UAW struggled to survive in its early years and organising Africans was a slow and secretive business. Workers were fearful, and union resources meagre. Yet beneath Africans’ cautious facade lay long-standing grievances, particularly around racial discrimination and unfair dismissal. The foremen’s sweeping powers included granting leave, giving permission to use toilets and decisions on wage increases, retrenchments and dismissals. An industrial relations director at General Motors joked: ‘The biggest optimist in the workforce was the guy who brought his sandwiches to work, because he had no assurance that he’d still be there at lunch time.’49 Formal complaints and appeal procedures were unheard of.
In some factories, including Volkswagen, former ANC, PAC and Sactu activists played a crucial organising role. Vuyo Kwinana and Themba Dyassi, for example, were members of an ANC underground cell and had served prison sentences. Elijah ‘Scoma’ Antonie had attended ANC and Sactu lectures, whilst Albert Gomomo was a PAC member who recruited his younger brother, John Gomomo, into the union. The recruiting drive in Uitenhage was an important venture into nonracial organising and shop floor control, as these activists, helped by Numarwosa, built secret cells across departments. Scoma and Papa Williams, Numarwosa’s president and a strong advocate of African membership, were rugby playing friends and worked in the same department. They and others developed a similar position to Mawu’s on political independence. Recalls Scoma: ‘If the ANC is banned, it stands to reason Sactu is also going to be banned. Now in order to avoid that, we did not want to align ourselves with ANC directly. We wanted to be an independent body.’50 This policy had the added advantage of attracting activists from different political groupings and nonpolitical workers.
These unionists used the tactic of taking over statutory liaison committees. Unlike the Tuacc unions, Numarwosa had no political objection to them. Often, liaison committee members were drawn from clandestine factory BECs. From 1973, Numarwosa shop stewards and liaison committee members began meeting regularly to ensure that the committee did not undermine the union’s industrial council negotiations.51
At Volkswagen (VW), union activists used the liaison committee to organise Africans into UAW and to win company recognition, and the close cooperation between coloured Numarwosa leaders and African factory activists made it easier to promote UAW to management. This powerful unity of coloured and African leaders was, however, not a feature of other auto factories. At Ford, for example, coloureds were employed at the Neave plant and African workers at the Cortina and Struandale plants.52
In the components sector, the liaison committee strategy was also used. Daniel Dube, a worker at SKF Bearings in Uitenhage and later Numsa president, recounted how UAW president John Mke and Numarwosa’s Sauls joined forces to gain recognition at SKF, a Swedish subsidiary, in 1976. Meeting resistance, they recruited liaison committee members and, after winning their support, used them as recruiters. Supported by a Swedish union which put pressure on the parent company, they succeeded in winning recognition in May 1977. Dube remembers this as a significant breakthrough, as SKF shop
