Heinemann worker Christina Gumede after being beaten in a police charge on workers (Numsa)
But by December 1976 Mawu was again on the point of collapse as membership fell, and by 1977 all organised workplaces had folded. Hardline companies refused to recognise the union or negotiate stop-order facilities, and it was on the brink of bankruptcy. Added to this was the banning in 1976 of four Mawu officials and the crushing defeat at one of its strongest Transvaal factories, Heinemann, where police savagely attacked strikers. The leadership went back to the drawing board and its new strategy was a stronger restatement of the Durban 1974 model, with additional decentralisation and the consolidation of membership in a handful of factories. The new objective was to clinch recognition agreements in a few companies. Fanaroff recalls:
Because the law didn’t provide for a recognition, you had to get a written agreement which would at least have the force of a civil contract, so there was a way of entrenching rights you had won. That became a strategy to get membership and then get management to talk to you, (50 + 1) [managements demanded that over 50 per cent of workers be union members] and then to get rights that could be written down despite the fact that black unions couldn’t be recognised.
This strategy included a takeover of liaison committees, which would provide access to workers, and space in which to organise.33 Mawu also decided to target bigger companies with large workforces which were less likely to resist unionism.34 Organising foreign companies such as British Glacier Bearings in Pinetown and Craft Industries in the Transvaal allowed the union to marshal international support and to use the European Economic Community and Sullivan Codes to force recognition. In the Transvaal, Mawu targeted Anglo American in a bid to exploit the conglomerate’s attempts to project itself as a reformer. It also concentrated on specific engineering sectors. Explains Fanaroff:
We targeted factories that we thought would be easier, like the Barlow factories, and the steel and electrical sector. I had these theories about monopolising specific industrial sectors for real power. The theory was that every time you spoke about money, employers told you about their competitors, so we said we must organise their competitors. We selected the domestic appliance industry and the steel industry where we thought we could get a major part of the competition organised. We avoided the little factories, but of course they came in.
Workers sit on benches in a makeshift hall (Numsa)
This painstaking process started to show results, and by 1979 both Mawu branches had consolidated a presence in a number of factories. The union was poised to win recognition at Tensile Rubber in the Transvaal, and was informally recognised at another eleven factories where grievance and disciplinary procedures were in force. The BECs too, were working well: in the Transvaal, they were regularly attended by representatives from eleven factories. The influence of white intellectuals started to wane as African leadership emerged at all levels of the union.35
Tucsa dissidents: Numarwosa, UAW, WPMawu, Eawu
There were other unions too, in the metal sector, which were to have a significant impact on Numsa’s accumulation of power in the 1980s. Rooted in a different tradition, they emerged from conservative, registered unions affiliated to Tucsa. Three of them, the coloured National Union of Motor Assembly and Rubber Workers of South Africa (Numarwosa), its African parallel United Automobile Workers (UAW), and the Western Province Motor Assemblers Workers’ Union (WPMawu) were launched in the Eastern and Western Cape in the 1960s and early 1970s. They moved into large auto factories, and so did not experience Mawu’s complex problem of how to organise hundreds of small engineering outfits.
Signing Mawu’s first recognition agreement with Tensile Rubber: L-R Alfred Manamela, shop stewards chairman; H Schutz, managing director; Andrew Zulu, vice-president Mawu; Bernie Fanaroff, Mawu organiser (Bernie Fanaroff)
Auto factories sprang up in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the Eastern Cape, when North American and Japanese producers expanded into the low-wage economies of the Third World. Ford and General Motors launched major expansion programmes and Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage grew with them. The growth of assembly plants encouraged the expansion of the components industry, initially producing low value-added items such as tyres, glass, upholstery, tubes, paint and hang-on components. State policy makers saw in the industry the seeds of a broader industrialisation strategy and began to push a local content programme, which led to the rapid expansion of the industry in the 1960s as new producers established plants and component suppliers sprang up alongside them.36
The result was a sharp rise in employment in the area. Automated assembly lines gave employers direct control over the pace of work through foremen with the power to grant pay rises and exercise discipline. Pay was relatively high. White workers were the first to organise and gain recognition for their union, Yster en Staal, in the 1960s, and in 1968 the Industrial Council for the Automobile Manufacturing Industry for the Eastern Cape was formed. Over time, coloured workers replaced whites as they moved into more skilled employment. In 1965, the Eastern and Western Cape had been zoned by the government as coloured labour preference areas, in which less skilled jobs were reserved for coloureds with the aim of excluding Africans. As a consequence, coloureds were far more numerous in auto assembly, although after 1985, as influx control laws fell away, many Africans entered the labour force. In the Transvaal, African labour dominated.37
Owing to the importance of the auto sector as an employer in Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage, it became the first target of the independent unions in the Eastern Cape in the 1970s. Total employment in the auto sector in 1979 stood at 21 009 of which whites constituted 35,6 per cent, coloureds 34,9 per cent and Africans 22,6 per cent.38
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