to observe industrial relations in Britain, Belgium and Germany.25
On many levels, the VW strike challenged the apartheid order. Triggered by a ban on a legitimate meeting, it had brought African and coloured workers together in a living wage demand which affirmed the right of the oppressed to a share of South Africa’s wealth. Black workers had outmanoeuvred management, the white residents of Uitenhage and the security forces. They had also said a resounding ‘no’ to the bargaining institutions of the apartheid state.
Pension strike wave
The early 1980s saw another significant outbreak of industrial action which challenged government policy – the pension strikes which engulfed South Africa, and particularly Natal and the Eastern Cape. This challenge from the shopfloor shifted the focus from struggles at the point of production to broader social welfare issues which eroded managements’ frontiers of control.
In the climate of government reform in the late 1970s, many employers set up pension funds for black workers, including migrants, to supplement the meagre state pension of R66 every two months. In March 1980, a government committee recommended ‘preservation’ to stop workers withdrawing their pension contributions until the age of 65. The rationale for the Preservation of Pensions Bill, introduced in 1981, was to ensure that workers were covered in their old age; its hidden agenda was to remove the burden of retirement provision from the state and to create a stable pool of funds which the government and business could freely borrow and invest, especially as many workers died before 65. Also proposed was a prescribed assets measure requiring all pension schemes to invest a percentage of contributions in government bonds.26
In a mounting wave, black workers downed tools and demanded that employers pay out their pension money before the Bill became law. In late 1980, 400 unorganised workers struck over this issue at Tubatse Ferrochrome in the Eastern Transvaal. Three strikes involving unionised workers then broke out in the Eastern Cape, including one at Firestone. In 1981, at least 30 000 workers struck in 27 companies countrywide and thousands were fired.27 As Dumisane Mbanjwa, a Mawu member in Natal and later a union organiser, recalled:
Fosatu booklet produced in response to a wave of opposition to the Preservation of Pensions Bill
There was very serious concern amongst the people in my plant at Huletts Aluminium. You look at pension fund as a provision that when you leave work you could actually live on that lump sum payment and it could substitute the UIF [Unemployment Insurance Fund]. So we did not quite agree with the government taking that kind of a decision, particularly the fact that the MD of the company was the chairperson of that group of people that made the decision.
So we organised around that issue. We managed to get majority membership and at the same time Mawu was making advances to get recognition. So the company had a series of workshops with workers … they were informing workers why the pension fund had to be operated in that way. Then the company decided that because workers were not keen on buying the story that whoever wanted to take his or her money from the pension fund should do so … but then at some point the company realised that almost everyone was beginning to withdraw their monies so they had to start tactics to stop people. Then 80 per cent of workers went out and the plant was almost at a standstill.
One thing that they did was to send a person with a camera into our meeting who posed as a Sunday Times newspaper reporter … she took all the pictures of us and things that we were saying in the meeting. And when the time came for selection of workers to re-hire all the pictures were in the office of the personnel department. And we were all out there with our fists up and chanting. So about 75 per cent of workers were taken back, but there was a group of workers who were not … we never even qualified for interviews. We just heard from other workers: ‘Do not even waste your time because your pictures are at the front.’28
The strikes took the unions by surprise. Academic Philip Bonner remembers that ‘most Fosatu unions at the time were absorbed in recognition and wage issues. They viewed the pensions uproar initially as a distraction and with bewilderment. Among other things they realised that this would lead them into a confrontation with the state at a point when they were unprepared to undertake it.’29 A three-way dialogue developed between organisers, shop stewards and sympathetic pension experts. Fosatu commissioned Bonner to look into the issue, and his research ‘permitted the definition of demands and the formulation of a powerful and persuasive opposing point of view’. He produced Fosatu’s first report, ‘Pensions Panic’, in November 1981.
The report pointed out that while skilled white workers had little fear of redundancy, Africans often faced long periods without work and their pension money became a means of survival. The government’s UIF paid less than half a worker’s wage for six months and migrant workers often did not receive their state pensions. Moreover, company payouts in homeland areas were usually sent to the local magistrate or black affairs commissioner’s office, or to the nearest trading store, often requiring workers to travel long distances.
Workers were also concerned that they only received the employer’s contribution if they had worked in the company for ten years or more. They feared that private pension payouts would fall below even the small state pension because they were based on workers’ low earnings. In addition, membership of a company fund could disqualify the worker from a state pension. Finally, many Africans died before the age of 65 and although family members could claim the money, fund administrators often did not inform members and their kin.30
The proposed law required pension schemes to invest 53 per cent of their contributions in government bonds, a considerable sum in an industry worth more than R10 billion. Fosatu made the astonishing discovery that much of this went on the purchase of equipment for the South African Defence Force, so black workers were unwittingly bolstering the very regime which trampled on them.
Fosatu called for the dropping of prescribed assets and urged talks between unions and employers on the larger issue of pension reform. It noted that black workers had no say on pension boards, where white company officials spoke on their behalf, and that employers used pension contributions to buy equipment rather than to meet workers’ social needs. Fosatu launched a campaign to demand majority worker representation on provident fund and pension boards, so that elected representatives could say how their money was invested.31
Employers, offended at workers’ rejection of their liberal move, took a hard line. Insisting that workers did not understand the Bill, which served their interests, as they often fired strikers en masse. Under union pressure, however, organised business started to rethink the issue. The Durban Chamber of Commerce urged the government to hold the Bill for three years so that workers could be educated, and it agreed. When the strikes persisted, the Federated Chamber of Industry called for the scrapping of the legislation, to which government also agreed. Soon afterwards, prescribed assets were dropped.32
Fosatu’s demands made a deep impact on employers. The Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce backed the idea of worker representation on pension fund boards. It urged companies to negotiate with unions on pension policy and suggested pension funds should invest in township upgrading. By now, however, unions were demanding that their members be allowed to control millions of rands in pension funds – a demand that alarmed employers, who protested that as they contributed half the money they should have half the say in its use.33
Pension strikers in October 1981 at Hulett’s Darnall sugar mill on Natal’s north coast (Daily News)
Mawu and Naawu continued to actively take up the campaign. They discovered that Seifsa had two racially constituted pension schemes and that black workers had no say over their fund which, in 1982, was worth R586 million and had 291 000 members.34 Mawu called for the restructuring of the Metal Industries Pension Fund Board to allow for majority worker representation, a demand Seifsa rejected. In 1983, long after the pensions bill had been dropped,