Metal That Will Not Bend

METAL
THAT WILL
NOT BEND
NATIONAL UNION OF METALWORKERS

OF SOUTH AFRICA 1980–1995
KALLY FORREST
METAL
THAT WILL
NOT BEND
NATIONAL UNION OF METALWORKERS
OF SOUTH AFRICA 1980–1995
KALLY FORREST
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press

1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
www.witspress.co.za
Copyright © Kally Forrest 2011

Copyright © Photographs as credited in captions
First published 2011
ISBN 978-1-86814-534-8
Wits University Press and the author have made every reasonable effort to locate, contact
and acknowledge copyright owners. Please notify us should copyright not have been
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Edited by Monica Seeber

Cover design and layout by Hothouse South Africa
Printed and bound by Ultra Litho (Pty.) Ltd.
Insimbi Ayigobi, Metal that will not Bend, is a National Union of Metalworkers of
South Africa slogan.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS vii
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER ONE Building local power: 1970s 5
CHAPTER TWO Power through numbers: 1980–1985 35
CHAPTER THREE Power in unity: 1980–1987 59
CHAPTER FOUR Breaking the apartheid mould: 1980–1982 76
CHAPTER FIVE Worker action fans out: 1980–1984 96
CHAPTER SIX Melding institutional, campaign and 119

bureaucratic power: 1983–1990
CHAPTER SEVEN Conquest of Metal Industrial Council: 1987–1988 146
CHAPTER EIGHT Auto workers take power: 1982–1989 164
CHAPTER NINE Auto takes on the industry: 1990–1992 182
CHAPTER TEN New directions: 1988–1991 204
CHAPTER ELEVEN Defeat of Mawu strategy: 1990–1992 224
CHAPTER TWELVE Towards a new industry: 1993 241
CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Cinderella sector: 1983–1990 259
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Applying vision in auto and motor: 1990–1995 276
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Applying vision in engineering: 1994–1995 294
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Independent worker movement: 1980–1986 320
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Beginnings of alliance politics: 1984–1986 336

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Weakening the socialist impulse: Civil war 365
in Natal 1987–1994
CHAPTER NINETEEN Civil war in Transvaal: 1989–1994 393
CHAPTER TWENTY New politics: 1987–1990 416
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Disinvestment: Pragmatic politics 1985–1989 444
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Compromising on socialism: 454

Legacy of the Alliance 1989–1995
APPENDIX 481
NOTES 487
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 550
INDEX 554
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A lengthy book such as this inevitably means a long, and mostly solo, journey. Along the
way however I met extraordinary and powerful people who lent me important support at
different times.
The story of course belongs to the numerous people that I interviewed and their union
colleagues. These soldiers of the metal unions freely shared with me their experiences,
struggles, sufferings, victories, jubilations, thoughts and analyses of the unions’ role in
the period they participated in. Their narratives and observations were astute and at times
inspirational, even when it was painful for them to revisit such memories. For many, it
was the first opportunity to return to these intense, exciting and fraught times, and for
most it was an important moment. I feel honoured to have been part of this. These were,
after all, people who richly contributed to creating a new democracy in South Africa and
who assisted in forging critical worker rights and improved conditions and wages for
thousands of racially oppressed and impoverished South Africans.
My thanks go to Numsa office bearers both past and present for setting me on a course
of tracing a fascinating history of courageous and creative workers and officials who
achieved an astounding amount in a very short period. Some of them gave particularly
generously of their time. Numsa’s Jenny Grice deserves special mention for her invaluable
assistance which, over the years, was given extensively and promptly.
I am also grateful to a number of academics. Sakhela Buhlungu originally encouraged
me to write Numsa’s story and his assistance was critical in certain phases of writing while
Glenn Adler continued to give enlightening input even after his departure to the US. My
appreciation goes to Professor Phil Bonner who guided me back into an academic mode
of thought and writing after years outside the field. His insights and suggestions on the
structuring of the history gave it a manageable and readable shape.
The production of a book is never an author’s alone; numerous people are involved in
its completion. In this regard I would like to thank Drew Forrest for doing an excellent
job of reducing an overly long PhD, Monica Seeber for her careful editing and Lisa Aarons
Platt whose layout made a dense manuscript into an attractive book.
vi METAL THAT WILL NOT BEND
Special thanks go to the photographers who have brought this book alive. These photos
are of great historic interest, and some are of outstanding quality. Indeed many of the
photographers – such as Cedric Nunn, Eric Miller, Anna Zieminski and Paul Weinberg –
have gone on to become famous in their own rights. I owe a special debt to William Matlala
for marking Numsa’s visual history over so many years.
I also thank the historical documents department of the University of the
Witwatersrand for granting me access to many rich photos, and Lucia Mshake for her
valuable research in unearthing photos from the Eastern Cape.
I should also like to express my gratitude to Numsa, to Atlantic Philanthropies and to the
University of the Witwatersrand for their financial assistance which made this book possible.
My children, Robert and Alex, grew up as I laboured on this history, and Numsa became
a household word. My deep gratitude goes to Melvyn who has given me friendship and
support in numerous ways including feedback on the manuscript. And my thanks go to
the many friends who gave me support along the way.
I owe a huge debt to the union movement for its nonracialism in action, for welcoming
me as a person seeking change in South Africa. Workers have always warmly embraced
my contribution, and I give this book back to them so that the story of their struggle in
these critical years of South African history will never be forgotten.
vii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
AAC Alexandra Action Committee

AAC Anti-Apartheid Conference
ABE Adult Basic Education
Actu Australian Council of Trade Unions
Ameo Automobile Manufacturers Employers’ Organisation
ANC African National Congress
Azactu Azanian Confederation of Trade Unions
Bac Brits Action Committee
BC Black Consciousness
BLA Black Local Authority
CC Central Committee
CEC Central Executive Committee
CMBU Confederation of Metal and Building Unions
Codesa Convention for a Democratic South Africa
Cosas Congress of South African Students
Cosatu Congress of South African Trade Unions
Cusa Council of Unions of South Africa
CWI Consolidated Wire Industries
CWIU Chemical Workers’ Industrial Union
EAWU Engineering and Allied Workers’ Union
EEC European Economic Community
EIWU Engineering Industrial Workers
ERAB East Rand Administration Board
Erapo East Rand People’s Organisation
Fawu Food and Allied Workers’ Union
FC Freedom Charter
FCI Federated Chamber of Industries
FCWU Food and Canning Workers’ Union
FIOM Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallurgici
Fofatusa Federation of Free Trade Unions of South Africa
Fosatu Federation of South African Trade Unions
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
Gawu General and Allied Workers Union
GEC General Electric Company
viii METAL THAT WILL NOT BEND
GFWBF General Factory Workers’ Benefit Fund

GM General Motors
GST General Sales Tax
GWU General Workers’ Union
HSL Household Subsistence Level
IAC Industrial Area Committee
IAS Industrial Aid Society
IC Industrial Council
ICA Industrial Conciliation Act
ICEF International Chemical and Energy Federation
ICFTU International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
ICU Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union
IETB Industry Education and Training Board
IFP Inkatha Freedom Party
ILO International Labour Organisation
IMF International Metalworkers’ Federation
IMF International Monetary Fund
IMS Iron Moulders’ Society
IMSSA Independent Mediation Services of South Africa
ISP Industrial Strategy Project
ITB Industry Training Board
JMC Joint Management Centre
JWC Joint Working Committee
KZP KwaZulu Police
Lifo Last in First Out
LRA Labour Relations Act
LRAA Labour Relations Amendment Act
LWC Living Wage Campaign
Macwusa Motor Assemblers’ and Component Workers’ Union
Mawu Metal and Allied Workers’ Union
MBSA Mercedez Benz South Africa
MDM Movement for Democratic Change
MDM Mass Democratic Movement
MIA Motor Industry Authority
Micwu Motor Industry Combined Workers’ Union
Mieu Motor Industry Employees’ Union of South Africa
MIGPF Metal Industries Group Pension Fund
MIMAF Metal Industries Medical Fund
Misa Motor Industry Staff Association
MITG Motor Industry Task Group
MK Umkhonto we Sizwe
Naamsa National Association of Automobile Manufacturers’ of South Africa
Naawu National Automobile and Allied Workers’ Union
Nactu National Council of Trade Unions
NBC National Bargaining Conference
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS ix
NBF National Bargaining Forum

NCC National Campaigns Coordinating Committee
NEC National Executive Committee
Nedcom National Education Committee
Nedlac National Economic Development and Labour Council
NEF National Economic Forum
NIC National Industrial Council
Nicisemi National Industrial Council for the Iron, Steel, Engineering
and Metallurgical Industry
Nicmi National Industrial Council for the Motor Industry
NLC National Liaison Committee
NMC National Manpower Commission
NOCC National Organising and Campaigns Committee
NP National Party
NS National Springs
NTB National Training Board
Num National Union of Mineworkers
Numarwosa National Union of Motor Assembly and Rubber Workers’ of South Africa
Numsa National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa
NUTW National Union of Textile Workers
NUWCC National Unemployed Workers’ Coordinating Committee
NWWC National Women Workers’ Committee
OCB Organising and Collective Bargaining
ODT Oukasie Development Trust
PAC Pan Africanist Congress
PCI Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party)
PDL Poverty Datum Line
PE Port Elizabeth
Pebco Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organisation
PSI Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party)
Pwawu Paper Wood and Allied Workers’ Union
PWV Pretoria/Witwatersrand/Vaal
RCC Regional Campaigns Committee
RDG Research and Development Group
RDP Reconstruction and Development Programme
Redcom Regional Education Committee
RPL Recognition of Prior Learning
Saawu South African Allied Workers’ Union
SABS South African Boilermakers’, Iron and Steelworkers’, Shipbuilders’
and Welders’ Society
Saccawu South African Commercial Catering and Allied Workers’ Union
Saccola South African Consultative Committee on Labour Affairs
Sacos South African Council on Sport
SACP South African Communist Party
Sactu South African Congress of Trade Unions
x METAL THAT WILL NOT BEND
SADF South African Defence Force

SA-IMF South African Council of the International Metalworkers’ Federation
SALB South African Labour Bulletin
Samcor South African Motor Corporation
Samiea South African Motor Industry Employers’ Association
SAQA South African Qualifications Act
SATLC South African Trades and Labour Council
SATS South African Transport Services
Savbra South African Vehicle Builders’ and Repairers Association
SDU Self Defence Unit
Seawusa Steel, Engineering and Allied Workers’ Union of South Africa
Seifsa Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa
SFAWU Sweet Food and Allied Workers’ Union
TGWU Transport and General Workers’ Union
Tuacc Trade Union Advisory Coordinating Council
Tucsa Trade Union Council of South Africa
UAW United Automobile, Rubber, and Allied Workers’ Union of South Africa
UDF United Democratic Front
UIF Unemployment Insurance Fund
Ummawusa United Metal Mining and Allied Workers’ Union of South Africa
Usco Union Steel Corporation
UTP Urban Training Project
Uwusa United Workers’ Union of South Africa
VAT Value Added Tax
VW Volkswagen
WIP Work in Progress
WPGWU Western Province General Workers’ Union
WPMawu Western Province Motor Assemblers Workers’ Union
WPWAB Western Province Workers’ Advice Bureau
YCW Young Christian Workers
1
Introduction
A furnace is like a large oven powered by elec-

tricity. The heat from the mouth of the fur-
naces … makes you weak. The white hot light
is so bright that you cannot look into the fur-
nace without a mask to protect your eyes.
Your job is to hook an overhead trailer full
of molten metal and pour the metal into the
mould. The job is very dangerous and you are
given no training at all, but just sent in with
the others. A hooter blows in the factory
when we are going to cast; casting is a serious
business … After about two months you get
the hang of the job, but before that many are
sacked because they recoil from the fires.
It was this job I did for seven years, the
work of a furnaceman. But inside the
foundry they call you a ‘cast-boy’ … Casting (Lesley Lawson)
is hard work and you must work very fast,
there is not time for rest … If I broke the rhythm and didn’t work for two or three days,
my whole body would ache.
We were not given proper safety boots and overalls … There are many accidents at the
furnace when we pour and when we carry pots. Very often the molten metal falls out of
the pots and burns us. It can burn you from the waist down, mostly on the legs. We only
have boots on and when the metal spills, it gets into your boots. There is no way you can
escape the danger of burning. We could use coats, arm covering, gloves and boots, but
the firm does not give them. We are two and sometimes four people carrying a pot, if
someone is not experienced we will always spill. You have to pick up the pot very high to
pour it into a big mould. I have been burned so many times I can’t count … Other workers
were badly injured and even killed by boiling metal.1
2 METAL THAT WILL NOT BEND
Mandlenkosi Makhoba’s grim recollection of conditions in an East Rand metal firm, Rely
Precision Castings, during the apartheid era in the 1970s, vividly captures why this history
has been written.
Since the late 1800s, labour has loomed large in the history of industrial South Africa,
and in the desire to control the movement of labour to urban areas lay the seeds of
apartheid. By 1948, when the National Party took the reins of government, the foundations
had already been laid for an economic and political system which allowed for white-con-
trolled capitalism to flourish by extracting superprofits from black labour. Over the years,
from the early twentieth century, black workers had made many attempts to organise, and
they fought some impressive battles, but it was only in the 1980s that their unions came
to wield genuine power, and to offer real protection to people like Makhoba.
In the early 1980s, when this account begins, a small politically independent section of
the trade union movement blossomed. It reinstated the dignity of labour in fundamental
ways and at times it dominated the political landscape. In the struggle to transform the
apartheid workplace, and ultimately the apartheid state, certain unions emerged as potent
forces for change, pioneering organising policies and methods which greatly bolstered
worker organisation. The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) and
its predecessors were some of these. Numsa affected thousands of workers’ lives, organised
and unorganised, as well as the lives of huge numbers of people in black communities,
and many employers.
This is not a history from the employers’ or from the government’s perspective. It is a
history teeming with human rights abuses which white business would prefer to be for-
gotten. It is an account of a crucial phase in the development of the metal and engineering
unions, written from their point of view.
It is rare to find an account of a single trade union which examines how it built and
used power. This book sets out to do that. By focusing on the combined themes of power,
independence and workers’ control and democracy, it analyses how these unions, which
ultimately became one, were able to make a significant contribution to change in South
Africa. It traces the development of Numsa and its forebears from the early 1980s through
to 1995, a year after South Africa’s first democratic elections, and looks at them as seats
of innovation in the broader labour movement.
Numsa spanned a range of pivotal manufacturing sectors and was divided into three indus-
trial sectors: engineering, auto and the motor industry more generally. Each one of these
accrued power differently while they were simultaneously guided by national union policies.
By the early 1980s, many of Numsa’s main strategies had been formulated by two of
its predecessors, the National Union of Motor Assembly and Rubber Workers of South
Africa (Numarwosa) and the Metal and Allied Workers Union (Mawu) under the umbrella
of the Trade Union Advisory Coordinating Committee (Tuacc). Numsa’s most significant
predecessors in the 1970s had a strong impact on its later way of operating – and its hybrid
tradition contributed to the growth of its power and to its weaknesses.
INTRODUCTION 3
Its predecessors took the important decision not to confront the state as a revolutionary
force, as was advocated by South African liberation movements. Instead, they chose to
build power incrementally by adopting an independent and disciplined approach which
rested on strong factory structures rooted in democratic accountability.
Numsa, and indeed the union movement, achieved tremendous gains in the 1980s in
both the workplace and in society at large in alliance with popular political organisations.
By 1989 it was poised to wield significant power for the country and for the future of the
union movement. To end here, however, would be to discard the reason why Numsa built
power in the first place: to overturn both apartheid and capitalist economic relations.
Looking further into the early 1990s allows for an exploration of how Numsa chose to
wield its influence in favour of working class power during the transition to democracy,
a transition that ushered in many challenges for the powerful union movement where it
now had to engage in a contested terrain fraught with complex questions and problems.
By this time a greater sense of the limitations to its bold vision had become apparent.
Martin describes unions as ‘institutions which are thought of as wielding great power
– or, at least, significant repositories of power’.2 But ‘power’ is a complex idea. Macun
suggests that in the South African labour context, it has generally been seen as little more
than the capacity to oppose. Frequently, the term carries the damning undertones of
domination and exploitation. In this book, the emphasis is on power as a force for
creativity and emancipation. Numsa and its parent unions, especially Mawu, drew heavily
on the ideas concerning union power, such as those of Antonio Gramsci and Rick Turner,
discussed in the Appendix.3 These theoretical perspectives became a source of both power
and contention, and were applied with varying degrees of success. Readers who wish to
better understand some of the ideas underlying these unions’ approaches should read the
Appendix, although the book can certainly be appreciated without it.
The pace of Numsa’s activities, and of its achievements in such a condensed period,
was extraordinarily fast. Thus it is useful to break down the main themes and periods
covered in this book as a guide to its logic. It should be noted that these themes sometimes
overlap in time so the book may return, at times, to an earlier period that has already
been covered under a different theme.
Chapters 1 to 5 (1980–1984) deal mainly with Numsa and its predecessors building local
power through various organising strategies which include its early focus on organising the
workplace and developing and educating shop stewards, committees and organisers. These
chapters also spotlight strategies to increase membership aided by the Wiehahn laws which
brought Africans into the industrial relations system, and by union mergers in different
parts of the metal sector which aimed to organise workers nationally.
Chapters 6 to 8 (1983–1989) trace Numsa’s building of national bureaucratic bargain-
ing and organisational power. The union streamlined its internal systems, enabling it to
operate more efficiently and to stabilise its income. It controversially entered the national
metal industrial council and through major industrial action became the most important
bargaining partner in both the engineering and auto sectors. This allowed it to consider
how to reshape its industries.
Chapters 9 to 15 (1989–1995) see a now powerful Numsa taking on the employers and
winning substantial gains in both wage and non-wage areas. However, in a recessionary
climate where its industries are declining and bleeding jobs, and after a disastrous national
engineering strike, the union turns to developing and implementing an alternative vision.
It now aims to create stable and predictable conditions to bolster the rebuilding of South
Africa’s embattled metal sectors while attempting to raise pay and the social wage. This
programme is flawed by tensions between national leaders and the factory floor and other
faulty assumptions which some believed were an ideological cover for retrenchments.
Chapters 16 to 22 (1980–1995) deal with Numsa’s socialist politics, tracing its different
political strands with an emphasis on its fierce independence and how this is compromised
by political conditions in South Africa, including the outbreak of severe violence, and the
nature of the alliances it forged.
5
CHAPTER ONE
Building local power: 1970s
I
‘ heard talk about how we had to fight for ourselves. This was all new to me but I was
interested in what they were saying. They were preaching unity and power.’1 In these
words, Moses Mayekiso recalled his first visit to the Metal and Allied Workers Union
(Mawu) offices in the early 1970s. At the time, he had no idea that over the next twenty
years ‘unity’ and ‘power’ would enable the union to transform thousands of South African
workplaces and the apartheid landscape.
Numsa’s steady accumulation of power followed decades of relative powerlessness for
African and coloured workers. In the 1970s, trade unions were not recognised by the
National Party government and were excluded from the collective bargaining structures of
the Industrial Conciliation Act and other labour laws. Capitalising on their shadowy status,
many employers refused to deal with them. Working class power was also weakened, as it
had been for half a century, by the migrant labour system and racial cleavages in the work-
place and the labour movement. The docile, bureaucratic white unions tolerated by the
government either ignored black labour or exercised paternalistic control over ‘parallel’
organisations for black workers. The political unionism which arose in the 1950s had been
smashed by a ferocious state onslaught on the African National Congress’s labour ally, the
South African Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu), after the banning of the ANC in 1960.
The rise and fall of Sactu formed an important ideological backdrop for the early metal
unionists of the 1970s. Underpinning Sactu’s relationship with the ANC, and their joint
political campaigns, was the theory of ‘internal colonialism’ formulated by the SACP chair,
Michael Harmel, which came to dominate left thinking. This held that South Africa con-
sisted of a former settler, now permanent, white middle class which exploited the mass of
rightless, indigenous black people. The first stage of struggle was to eliminate racial oppres-
sion through a national struggle waged by a class alliance. After the defeat of the white
minority government, working class interests would diverge from those of the black
Segregated toilets at Iscor in Vanderbijlpark, 1992 (W Matlala)
bourgeoisie and a new stage of working class struggle would begin. Trade unionism was
thus important, but secondary, to liberation politics.2 As a result, the slow, painstaking
construction of workplace democracy was neglected by the Sactu unions. Shop stewards
committees were rare and in the main workers had little factory power. National solidarity
was also poorly developed, and when the state, armed with new powers of detention with-
out trial, cracked down on Sactu and drove its leadership into exile, the latter’s affiliates
were severely weakened.3
The 1960s ushered in a period of industrial peace for the Nationalists, accompanied by
a booming economy, unfettered by political unrest, and underpinned by a plentiful supply
of cheap labour. In the unnatural industrial calm that followed, from the mid-1960s
onwards, the structure of the South African economy changed: agriculture and mining
declined and manufacturing, commerce, finance and services grew in importance; foreign
capital flooded into the country, fuelling the concentration of capital in the South African
economy within certain monopolistic companies and within certain industrial sectors,
and many more Africans joined the formal economy.
It was in this context that the Nationalists turned their attention to consolidating the
apartheid state. The state’s social engineering in this period rested on four pillars strength-
ened by a plethora of new laws. The first pillar was reinforced by the intensification of
influx control measures and the redefinition of all Africans, however urbanised, as
permanent residents of ethnic homelands. The second pillar of Nationalist reconstruction
rested on the concentration of power in white, especially Afrikaner, hands. Heavy penalties
were meted out to those whom the state suspected of furthering the aims of a banned
organisation or of crossing the racial barrier. The third pillar was the apartheid welfare
BUILDING LOCAL POWER: 1970s 7
Semi-skilled machine operator (Lesley Lawson)
regime which separated all social services. Differentiated education institutions, health
facilities, and pension services were created, and in all of these whites were allocated the
highest proportion of the state budget whilst Africans were allocated the lowest.4 The
apartheid workplace was the final pillar bolstering the apartheid regime. The most skilled
jobs were reserved for whites whilst Africans laboured in the most unskilled, lowest paid,
hardest, dirtiest, most tedious and dangerous jobs. The segregation of workplace facilities
was reinforced by the Factories Act which dictated that employers provide racially segre-
gated amenities such as change rooms, canteens and toilets.
By the mid-1960s, a semi-skilled labour shortage was in evidence. Until the 1960s,
skilled white artisans had controlled the metal industry through powerful craft unions,
but now white labour struck a compromise with employers whereby it agreed to tolerate
the limited mobility of black labour in exchange for higher wages and the reservation of
the more skilled grades of employment for whites.5 Employers mechanised, split up skilled
jobs and began hiring large numbers of African semi-skilled machine operators; the grad-
uation of many Africans from unskilled to semi-skilled work would, as Owen Crankshaw
points out, have crucial implications for union organisation.6
The 1960s came to a close in a way that presented formidable obstacles for trade union
organisation as worker power was at its lowest ebb since the onset of industrialisation.
Working class power in South Africa had been unevenly built over 50 years in what Ross
Martin terms ‘a history of quite extraordinary organisational instability’.7 White and black
workers were polarised; African, Indian and coloured workers had been forced apart by
differing organisational rights and urbanisation policies; and African workers were divided
from each other through differential rights to reside in urban areas.
White unions went through the motions of negotiating minimum wages in industrial
councils, knowing that their members commanded far higher rates of payment because
of their scarce skills, and to protect their privileged status they barred black workers from
training opportunities. As Peter Alexander observes, ‘“race” was not the only basis for
divisions within the working class. “Skill” had a major impact on wages and trade union
organisation.’8 Coloured and Indian trade unions, where they existed, expressed a similar
lack of solidarity with African labour and were also badly weakened by the racial hierarchy
in the workplace. Linked to the absence of workplace organisational power was black
labour’s inability to participate in, or shape, the rules of engagement in industrial relations
and political institutions.
Yet new possibilities were taking shape. The growth in all sectors, the emergence of
many semi-skilled Africans and the development of monopoly capitalism had brought
large numbers of workers together in production. These conditions would provide an
organisational basis for the unions which would emerge in the 1970s.
The 1970s: new light

By 1973, the economy was slowing, and by 1978 it was in deep recession. For metal workers
on the East Rand, these were ‘lean years’.9 Forced removals placed intolerable pressures
on the overcrowded reserves, and huge numbers of desperate people flooded into the
cities in search of work.
In this context, two ruptures changed the course of South African history. In 1973, a
wave of spontaneous strikes erupted in the Durban industrial centre of Pinetown; an esti-
mated 70 000 workers in different industries downed tools and demonstrated that beneath
the quiescence of the 1960s rankled resentment at low wages and stressful working con-
ditions in the face of flourishing industries and employer prosperity. (In the early 1970s,
inflation eroded wages as labour confronted price rises of up to 40 per cent on basic
goods;10 in 1973, the average African pay was R13 a week, well below the R18 stipulated
by the Poverty Datum Line.) The strikes brought to the fore the inadequacies of South
Africa’s dual labour relations system and signalled a reawakening of working class mili-
tancy – new trade unions were formed, including Mawu, which aimed to organise African
workers. The strikes also shocked employers into realising that new systems of control
were necessary and as a result the Bantu Labour Relations Act was passed, which intro-
duced non-union management/worker structures known as liaison committees. It soon
became apparent however that they were no substitute for union organisation, as strikes
continued to erupt. Between 1973 and 1976, the number of African workers involved in
industrial action each year never fell below 30 000.11
The next rupture in the fabric of the apartheid state occurred in 1976. In the economic
boom of the early 1970s, industry experienced a shortage of skilled manpower, which
pressured the state to provide better education for black people. An increase in the number
of black high schools and of places at universities for black students led to a substantial
Durban strikers in 1973 (unknown)
increase in the number of black intellectuals, many of whom embraced the Black
Consciousness ideology which was partly responsible for the student uprising, starting
on 16 June 1976, to protest the Bantu education system and, in 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 polit-
ically conscious students entered the labour force. They were to be highly responsive to
union organising drives.
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 home-
land ‘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 instruc-
tions. 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 adminis-
tered benefits for workers and provided a forum
for the discussion of factory problems. In this way
the GFWBF brought white intellectuals into reg-
ular 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 num-
Mawu logo ber of Sactu organisers in their ranks, were soon
David Hemson recruiting in the early days on the bonnet of his car in the absence of local offices (unknown)
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
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 work-
ers 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
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)
Baba K’s membership card – he was the 28th worker to join Mawu and his monthly subscription was 80c
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 weak-
ened 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
An early strike in Mawu at Stocks and Stocks in Clayville (Midrand) owned by Stobar Pty Ltd. The
union did not have access to many company premises so workers met outside in the veld or under a
patch of trees (Numsa)
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
Together with shop stewards from other factories, the shop stewards committee then chose
representatives to a branch executive committee (BEC), which in turn elected representa-
tives to a national executive committee (NEC) of factory leaders. National officials
attended these meetings in a non-voting capacity. There were report-backs and careful
mandating at all levels.
In the same year that Mawu was formed, the National Union of Textile Workers
(NUTW) and the Trade Union Advisory Coordinating Committee (Tuacc) emerged from
the GFWBF. In 1974, under Tuacc’s banner, they were joined by the Chemical Workers
Industrial Union (CWIU) and the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU). Tuacc
set out to build non-racial industrial unions based on strong, democratic factory floor
organisation through shop steward representation. Its job was to coordinate the activities,
finances and administration of the four unions and to formulate policies. It also allowed
for the sharing of resources, including education. It laid the foundations for the later
Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu).20
If the role of white intellectuals in Tuacc was

contentious (Donovan Lowry recalls the ‘over-
whelming presence of white intellectuals’ in their
delegations21), they nevertheless played an
important role in the early days, sharing skills,
knowledge and resources which were denied their
black union colleagues. Some became unionists,
and others offered skills in legal, administrative,
economic, political and financial areas, often vol-
untarily. They also played a teaching role, recog-
nising that workers’ education was critical to the
building of shop steward leadership.22 Sakhela
Buhlungu has pointed out that white intellectuals
are often solely credited with the creation of a
democratic tradition within these unions
Tuacc president with Tembi Nabe, later whereas he believes it was the product of a
Mawu general secretary (Numsa) dynamic interaction between the lived experi-
ences of black workers and the contribution of
community, party (SACP, ANC, Sactu) and university intellectuals.23
The Sactu activists and the white intellectuals were both striving for a non-racial, dem-
ocratic South Africa, but many of the whites had a different standpoint. ‘We had a totally
different tradition: we didn’t mind using any structures provided we could maintain our
independence. Workers’ independence was everything,’ commented Mike Morris, a union
activist of the 1970s.24 White intellectuals drew on the European tradition of union organ-
isation and socialist politics rather than the national liberation agenda of the ANC and
Sactu. The Marxist and socialist ideologies they embraced taught them that raising workers’
consciousness was the route to changing power relations in society, and their strong tactical
sense made them appreciate that to build workers’ power for socialism it was necessary to
offer workers real benefits.25 Organising workers into unions was an ideal vehicle. Wages
and conditions would be improved while power was built up for political change.26 In this
lay the seeds of the ‘populist/workerist’ debate. Explains Mawu organiser Moses Mayekiso:
The term (socialism) was around from early in Mawu’s activities. It was difficult at the time
to propagate socialist ideas but leadership in workshops used to discuss the issue linked to
trade union organising strategy, and that socialism will be successful if it is centred around
organised workers. This was in the 1970s. That’s what divided the leadership into so-called
‘workerist’ and ‘populist’ camps. They were based on interpretations of the final goal.27
The dominant workerist tendency, influenced by Marxism, repudiated the national demo-
cratic struggle espoused by the ANC in favour of a democratic socialist future. The ‘populist’
group favoured links with the national liberation

movement, whose primary aim was to destroy the
apartheid state. At times, political differences were
acrimonious, and the state strengthened the hand
of the ‘workerists’ by banning ‘populist’organisers
Sipho Khubeka and Gavin Anderson in 1976. Yet
there was also considerable consensus on the
unionisation process, as Khubeka recalls: ‘You had
two groups who did not see eye to eye politically.
There were the students and lecturers who felt side-
lined by Nationalist politics, on the one hand, and
some white students and lecturers and intellectuals
who were supportive of the ANC or Sactu, on the
other. Yet they had a common purpose.’28
After the 1973 strike wave, Mawu’s membership
grew rapidly in Natal, and by mid-1974 it had 3 883 Mawu organiser Sipho Kubheka
signed-up members in at least 68 factories. (W Matlala)
Thereafter membership tailed off, and the Mawu
organisers, who had moved from factory to factory without consolidating, came to under-
stand that numbers could not be a substitute for strong factory organisation. Employers, too,
had recovered from the shock of the strikes and were actively promoting liaison committees.
In addition, a number of unionists were banned in 1974, including Mawu’s Pietermaritzburg
organiser, Jeanette Cunningham-Brown. In consequence, a new strategy was adopted, involv-
ing the consolidation of organisation in a limited number of factories; shop stewards played
a central role and were directly accountable to members, organising in their departments and
dealing with management. They also represented members on Mawu’s BEC. Local offices
were opened to promote members’ participation in union affairs.29
In Johannesburg, another struggle to revive unionism was underway, although organ-
isers could not recruit on the back of a strike wave. The Industrial Aid Society (IAS), with
similar aims to the GFWBF, was slowly recruiting and was building factory committees.
It was founded by a similar combination of people who, from the outset, focused on the
metal engineering sector because of its economic centrality.30
Worker members of the IAS attended classes run by University of the Witwatersrand
lecturers and explored the experiences of the ICU in the 1920s and of Sactu in the 1950s.
To these intellectuals, the failure of the ICU was organisational: it had failed to win recog-
nised trade union status for Africans because it spread itself too thinly across sectors in a
general union model; it placed excessive emphasis on unaccountable leadership; and it
failed to organise members into strong independent worker structures which could with-
stand government repression. The lessons for workers in the 1970s was that they must
organise into tight industrial unions which, through worker power, would force state and
employers to recognise African unions. Sactu’s approach differed from the ICU’s in that
it was a meeting point for factory-based unions. But for white intellectuals Sactu’s decline
was a brutal lesson in organisational politics. They saw that Sactu had delayed organising
the most powerful sectors of the economy, such as engineering and mining, and that it
was unable to impose a working class direction on the Congress Alliance and had lost its
independence. The main lesson they drew, however, was that there was danger in linking
factory-based struggles with broader political campaigns which had attracted the attention
of state security, and to ensure survival they concluded that unions should avoid overt
links with exiled nationalist movements and maintain their independence.31 A survey con-
ducted in the 1970s by sociologist Eddie Webster on why workers avoided joining the new
unions found that they were afraid of dismissal and of police action, believing that the
state would associate labour activism with the ANC.32 In consequence, union organisers
were at pains to adopt a low profile. Mawu organiser Mike Murphy emphasises, however,
that this did not mean emulating the conservative Tucsa unions:
We rejected Tucsa’s way of operating. We went to a factory and talked to people and found
out what their problems were and then we’d get a meeting together and plug straight
away into informal factory leadership. With Tucsa, this basic stuff was absent. Tucsa was
a bureaucracy because it had a faith in the law, a financial base in terms of the law, a sub-
scription system, which kept the office functioning and you play a game with management
– you scratch their back, they scratch yours and nothing changes much.
The new unionists vigorously debated what form organisation should take. In Natal,
Tuacc’s intellectuals and workers made an early choice in favour of industrial unions,
and Alpheus Mthethwa, Mawu’s first Natal branch secretary, travelled to Johannesburg
to persuade the metal wing of the IAS to join his union. There he ran into a raging debate
on whether to form industrial or general unions. Kubheka recalls:
The discussion was that we have seen general unions in the past … and they were not
very effective because they did not organise strongly on the ground, they did not have a
focus on a particular sector. Some people also argued that general unions tend to be more
political, and this was dangerous because they do not focus on the building of grassroots
structures, and it was dangerous to be too political at that time.
Then the other argument was that industrial unions are divisive. Why not have one gen-
eral union divided into different sectors, so that you have one line of march in the same
kind of union? It would also be easier in terms of resources. You may have a very weak union
with vulnerable workers by virtue of their sector, for instance the construction industry
where the industry is not based in one place. Then we have a metal industry which is situated
in one place where there are many workers. Then the resources could be easily shared if we
have one union, one policy, similar principles … these were all very forceful arguments.
The IAS developed close ties with Tuacc and the

latter’s plea for industrial unionism ultimately
won the day. In 1975, unionists agreed to form a
Transvaal branch of Mawu.
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, Heinemann worker Christina Gumede after
with additional decentralisation and the consoli- being beaten in a police charge on workers
(Numsa)
dation 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
Workers sit on benches in a makeshift hall (Numsa)
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.
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
Automobile conference bringing together Johnny Mke of Western WPMawu, Fred Sauls of Naawu, and
James Campbell of Numarwosa (Wits archives)
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 con-
stituted 35,6 per cent, coloureds 34,9 per cent and Africans 22,6 per cent.38
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 mem-
bership 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 con-
cluded. 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 manage-
ment, 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 estab-
lished 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 impoverish-
ment 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 amalga-
mation 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 lead-
ers 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) associ-
ated 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 secre-
tive 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 advan-
tage 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 mem-
bers 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 manage-
ment. 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 pres-
ident 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 stewards
rapidly recruited members in other Uitenhage
component factories, including Dorbyl, Borg-
Warner, Bosal and National Standard. Port
Elizabeth followed suit, with recruiting gains at
Willard Batteries, Autoplastics and Dorbyl.
Uitenhage shop stewards also helped other emerg-
ing unions, including the NUTW and the Sweet
Food and Allied Workers Union (SFAWU).53 John Gomomo, a recruiter for UAW and
By the end of 1979, UAW had significant later a Numsa office bearer and Cosatu
membership at six Port Elizabeth factories and president (W Matlala)
had won recognition at VW, SKF, Ford and
General Motors, including stop-order facilities. It had become the first genuinely national
union in the new union movement, with branches in Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage, Durban
and East London and a presence in large plants in Pretoria.54
One of Numarwosa/UAW’s critical contributions was the building of strong black lead-
ership for the new union movement. Much of it was developed in day to day factory struggles
and by the end of the 1970s it was managing large-scale industrial action. Sauls recalls the
impact of unionisation in the Eastern Cape by the early 1980s:
They [trade unions] have had a tremendous impact on the area. Companies are multina-
tionals but I can say their attitudes have definitely changed. What is important to me is
that people around Uitenhage and PE have really been made aware of the role of trade
unionism … during the strike at VW [in 1980], the church people, without our approach-
ing them, have sent circulars to some of the churches telling them that they must address
themselves to the conditions under which their congregations are living and working.
First it was the Eveready strike, then it was Ford, now it’s the strike at VW. Since then, a
lot of people are sitting up. We’ve at least reached the stage where the balance of power
across the negotiating table is more or less equal: we don’t have to beg or plead any more.
They [workers] realise where the power is: it’s not across the negotiating table. The power
is in the capital of management and in the labour power of workers on the floor.
The 1978 strike at British battery manufacturer Eveready was the first legal strike in South
Africa for twenty years. Numarwosa’s 320 members, mostly coloured women, struck to
demand recognition. Gloria Barry, a former

Eveready worker and later vice-president of
Numarwosa, recalls that ‘the conditions that
these women worked under in Eveready were very
bad … once the production lines started, they
couldn’t leave to go to the toilet! There were boxes
put down and they had to relieve themselves on
the line.’55 During the strike the company called
in the police, used scab labour and fired all the
strikers, who continued striking for a further six
months without success and suffered for years
from a blacklist used by local companies.
The Eveready defeat made a deep impression
on the emerging unions. It hardened their attitude
Thozamile Botha, Ford Cortina Struandale to the official bargaining system by highlighting
worker and Pebco leader (EP Herald) that a legal strike did not protect workers from
dismissal or police action and that union registra-
tion did not guarantee bargaining rights.56 It also underscored the limits to the strategy of
organising foreign-owned companies. One useful consequence of the strike, however, was
the strengthening of ties between Numarwosa and Tuacc. Tuacc’s Alec Erwin visited Port
Elizabeth during the dispute and was impressed. ‘They lost but that had nothing to do with
the way they organised it. The strike convinced me we had a lot to learn from them.’57
A series of strikes at Ford in 1979 provided some salutary lessons which forced the
union to examine its policy of political independence. The first strike began in October
1979 at the Cortina Struandale Plant when Thozamile Botha, a trainee draughtsman and
leader of the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organisation (Pebco), resigned because the com-
pany was putting pressure on him over his political activity. Workers distributed pamphlets
warning that ‘if he [Botha] is not here at noon today, tools down everybody’. Port
Elizabeth was emerging as a centre of African resistance to apartheid, and Botha was
addressing rallies of 10 000 people. At noon, 700 African workers gathered on the com-
pany’s lawns for Botha to address them. Ford’s personnel officer urged them to return to
work and asked UAW’s John Mke to translate. When workers heard their union president
talking management language, Mke’s days as a worker leader were over.58
The irony was that UAW supported the workers’ demands; after the strike ended with
Botha’s reinstatement, it negotiated full pay for strikers. Countering Pebco’s accusations
that it had sold out the workers, Sauls retorted angrily: ‘It was clear to us: Pebco used this
to show their control over workers. And they succeeded. They could get all the workers
out and keep them out for three days. It was then clear that Botha was not pursuing the
interests of the workers. He did not ask the question about the lost pay.’ In a press state-
ment, Numarwosa organiser George Manase restated the union’s policy: ‘We are fighting
Women strikers from Eveready in Port Elizabeth receiving food parcels and strike pay of R10 each from
Danny Leen (left), organising secretary of the National Union of Motor Assembly and Rubber Workers,
in November 1978 (EP Herald)
for the liberation of the black people … we should operate on our area – trade unions –
and politicians in theirs. We must work on parallel lines. These militant radicals interfere
with us.’59 Other BEC members endorsed his view, while Sauls reaffirmed the need for
unions to maintain their political independence.
The leadership of UAW and Numarwosa were not, however, apolitical. They rejected
racial divisions and were concerned to build workers’ awareness of themselves as able to
overcome exploitation and a sense of inferiority to whites. In the mid-1970s, as they linked
up with unions elsewhere, they began to develop education programmes which cast workers
as an oppressed class. Their perspective would bring them closer to the leaders of Mawu.
The Pebco stoppage triggered a spate of strikes at Ford in which UAW negotiated on
workers’ behalf and when the company fired 700 strikers it demanded reinstatement. At this
point the power struggle between UAW and Pebco resurfaced, with a group of dismissed
workers electing an independent Pebco committee, later the Ford Workers Committee, to
negotiate with management. Eventually, an embarrassed US government intervened and
Ford agreed to reinstate the strikers.60
The Ford dispute raised issues for the UAW leaders, who were clearly out of touch with
worker militancy. When they told workers that Ford was open to partial reinstatement,
they were accused of being sell-outs and likened to hated community councillors.
A few months later, the Ford committee launched the rival Motor Assembly and
Component Workers Union of South Africa (Macwusa), committed to fighting for rights in
the townships as well as in factories. Over time, Macwusa recruited members in Port Elizabeth,
Uitenhage and Pretoria, although it never overtook UAW and Numarwosa membership.61
Some of the 700 Ford workers leaving the Ford Struandale assembly plant after a meeting in November
1979. Management considered workers to have terminated their service (EP Herald: Siphiwe)
WPMawu delegation to Fosatu launch in 1979 (Joe Foster front left) (Wits archives)
The Ford disputes forced the UAW to examine its organising strategy. It concluded that organ-
isers and factory representatives did not meet members often enough and that it had failed
to build strong factory structures, allowing militants to view it as a management–government
puppet. The weakness of the liaison committee strategy was also brought into strong relief.
The union responded by strengthening shop steward structures and renegotiating grievance
procedures to ensure that workers had a voice, and the upshot was the signing of an unusually
sophisticated agreement in which Ford agreed to full-time shop stewards on full pay – a prece-
dent soon followed by VW.62
The strikes signalled that workers would inevitably turn their newfound confidence
and factory power to the voicing of wider political grievances. They also alerted other
employers to the danger of dealing with ineffective worker structures. Among other work-
ers in the Eastern Cape, and elsewhere in South Africa, these workers’ militancy and
victories were watched with keen interest.63
At the time that Numarwosa was breaking out of the Tucsa mould, another coloured
union, the Western Province Motor Assemblers Union (WPMawu) was challenging
Tucsa’s leadership. Formed in Cape Town in 1961 by coloured workers, it soon won recog-
nition at Austen Motors, Chrysler and British Leyland. Natie Gantana, a Leyland worker
and president of WPMawu, recalled that at this stage the union ‘had a sad history because
it had a sad executive. It was recognised by law and the company but it didn’t operate in
the workers’ interests … The leaders were management guys – they didn’t want to put up
a hard fight … The shop stewards were senior blokes, inspectors and charge hands, and
the blue overall guys never qualified to be shop stewards.’64
A persistent worker grievance was that union leaders negotiated better pay rises for
higher grades at Leyland, including themselves. A small group of union activists cam-
paigned house to house and at a general meeting members passed a motion of no confi-
dence in the executive. They formed an interim executive committee, suspended a
proposed merger with UAW, and voted out the old executive in 1972.65
In the same year, Joe Foster, a printworker, was appointed national secretary (Tucsa’s
secretaries were not elected) and began restoring worker control through accountable
shop stewards. Foster commented: ‘We believe very strongly in participatory democracy,
in grassroots democracy. We, the executive and officials, could run the union efficiently
like a business if we wanted to … but we don’t think things should run that way. We
believe that a future democratic South Africa should be run by the people, that the workers
should participate in the running of the country.’66
WPMawu broke with Tucsa in 1972 and tried to convince Numarwosa to do likewise,67
but the latter followed only four years later. Sauls recalls why it left:
When we started looking at our relationship with UAW and the direction in which the
union was going our affiliation to Tucsa and the IMF [International Metalworkers Feder-
ation] became important issues.68 In our discussions the question arose that if the UAW
does not fit into Tucsa there must be something drastically wrong with that organisation.
We had discussions with Tucsa unions at annual conferences to see how they viewed the
bringing in of African workers into the Tucsa fold … when we had feedback from this,
we were shocked … so we decided we are just wasting our time in Tucsa.
It was at this point that Sauls decided to sound out WPMawu on the question of unity.
Foster recalls Sauls convening a meeting in 1976 with other unions at the US consulate in
Johannesburg. Foster, who had socialist leanings, viewed the attempt with suspicion. It
was a later initiative from the IMF to form a southern African coordinating committee
that ultimately brought the Cape unions, as well as Mawu, together. Foster recalls: ‘When
Alec [Erwin, of Mawu] came to IMF meetings

and started to talk about workers’ control, we
realised we had an affinity.’
The IMF Southern African Coordinating
Council also forged links between these unions
and another dissident Tucsa affiliate which
emerged in the 1970s, the Engineering and Allied
Workers Union (Eawu). It was started in the mid-
1960s as part of Tucsa’s African Affairs
Committee of the Sheet Metal Workers Union.
Sactu bitterly opposed its formation, viewing it
as Tucsa ‘splitting tactics’ and Sactu historians
Luckhardt and Wall claimed that ‘it never really
got off the ground’.69 It did, however, get off the
ground when it was expelled from Tucsa and
EAWU organiser and later Mawu Western received help from the Urban Training Project
Transvaal organiser Petrus Tom (Wits archives) (UTP). EAWU grew in strength, and by 1974 its
paid up membership was 3 000; its signed up

membership was 9 000 by 1976, by which time it was financially independent.70
An EAWU organiser, Petrus Tom, was successfully organising large numbers of engi-
neering workers in the Vaal branch in the industrial areas of Vanderbijlpark and
Vereeniging in the Transvaal. Mawu, too, was beginning to organise in the area, and the
EAWU branch developed a respect for its way of working, accountable to the membership
through mandates and report-backs in order to ensure worker control of the union. It
clashed with the Springs head office by accusing it of laziness, and in 1981 general secretary
Calvin Nkabinde dismissed Vaal officials, who joined Mawu, taking the branch executive
with them. Meanwhile Nkabinde had brought EAWU into Fosatu in 1979 on its formation.
But he often refused to implement Fosatu policy and was critical of its white leaders, and
in 1982 EAWU was expelled from the federation. This enabled Mawu’s Vaal branch to
recruit widely and win recognition in former EAWU factories.71
These ex-Tucsa unions brought a distinctive tradition to Numsa which would con-
tribute significantly to its organising methods, bargaining choices and administrative style.
In Tucsa: Motor Industry Combined Workers Union

Whilst Numarwosa/UAW, WPMawu and Mawu were drawing closer in the 1970s, another
union, the Motor Industry Combined Workers’ Union (Micwu), viewed Mawu, and to
some extent Numarwosa, as competitors.
Micwu was a coloured union which, in the 1970s, had remained in the Tucsa fold.
Tucsa’s commitment to black trade unionism over three decades had been erratic, often
instrumental and progressively more determined by the policies of the apartheid state. It
admitted and expelled, or partially expelled, African and coloured unions from its ranks
according to the political exigencies of the day. In the 1950s, when it was competing with
Sactu, it grudgingly accepted mixed race unions. It was a moderate non-political federation
which upheld free market principles and was principally engaged in orthodox union wage
bargaining.72 Out of a desire to prevent black workers from falling into communist
clutches, it decided to organise black workers in the 1950s and supported the US-backed
Federation of Free Trade Unions of SA (Fofatusa). When Sactu leaders were jailed, killed
in detention and forced into exile in the early 1960s, it offered no support.
The 1956 Industrial Conciliation Amendment Act which prohibited African workers
from joining registered trade unions, had forced coloured and Indian union members
into segregated branches controlled by a white executive. This was why Micwu’s coloured
workers were originally members of unions parallel to the white Motor Industry Staff
Association (Misa), a clerical union, and the Motor Industry Employees’ Union of South
Africa (Mieu), a union representing artisans in the motor industry. Both were affiliated
to Tucsa although the ultra-conservative Misa later withdrew in opposition to the feder-
ation opening up membership to coloured workers. Coloured and Indian workers were
permitted to join Mieu as ‘B’ class members, but the white union later introduced
coloured parallel membership and represented them on the industrial council.73
By the mid 1960s, grand apartheid was at its height. As the government grew in confi-
dence so Tucsa moved to the right and a number of its unions threatened to disaffiliate
unless it mirrored government separatist policies. In response Tucsa expelled its black
trade unions in 1969.74 Its attitude to the emerging nonracial unions of the 1970s was
characterised by the same antipathy it had demonstrated to Sactu.75
After Tucsa expelled its black unions, Mieu’s white executive instructed its former coloured
members to form their own union, and the result was Micwu, registered in 1970 as a Tucsa
affiliate. All its members were artisans, concentrated in Natal and the Western Cape, although
later in the 1970s the union extended its scope to include clerical workers. The union soon
picked up members in the Eastern Province, the Transvaal, and the Northern Cape, where it
established regional offices which operated independently, although the head office formulated
policy. By the end of the 1970s, its membership profile differed, depending on the province.
In the Western Cape and Natal, coloured and Indian artisans predominated; in the Transvaal
and the Eastern Cape a mixture of blue and white collar, mainly coloured, mechanics and
mechanic assistants were in the majority; whilst in the Transvaal, from the late 1970s onwards,
African repair assistants and petrol pump attendants started to join in numbers. Micwu’s
leaders, however, remained mainly coloured and conservative, in the Tucsa tradition.76
In all its factories the union relied on closed shop agreements negotiated in the motor
industrial council. This meant that all qualified coloured and Indian artisans, motor
trimmers, panel beaters, diesel mechanics, auto electricians and vehicle bodybuilders were
automatically members. As motor industry artisans worked in small firms scattered across
the country, the closed shop enabled the union to build membership with minimal staff
and resources. It also meant that little active organisation or recruitment was necessary.
There was minimal contact with members (the contrast with the Tuacc unions and their
emphasis on worker democracy was sharp). Members joined by filling in a stop order
form which was forwarded to the industrial council. Servicing of membership by officials
usually entailed a phone call to the employer. No active workplace committees existed,
and strikes were unheard of. A former Micwu general secretary, Des East recalls:
We didn’t have a system of shop stewards. This we introduced just before we merged into
Numsa [in 1987]. When we took on clerical workers they were the ones who started coming
to meetings. Artisans only came to meetings when they were worried about their medical
aid, they didn’t need any protection in the workplace. If the employer did anything they
didn’t like they’d walk out. When the clerical workers came with their problems, the artisans
would stay away from meetings. When Africans came into Micwu, general workers and
labourers, then the clerical workers who had now reached a nice level of wages stopped
coming to meetings. It was the person with the problems that attended the meetings.77
In fairness, Micwu’s African membership was mainly unskilled and spread across the
country in small workplaces, which hampered industrial action. Many were petrol pump
attendants and employers countered any talk of action by threatening to install self-
service pumps.78
Unlike Mawu, Micwu was relatively well off. It relied on an efficient industrial council
administrative system to which companies submitted membership subscriptions accom-
panied by a list of members’ names. Its financial standing allowed it to fund all its activities,
to occupy well equipped offices, and to employ skilled staff. It built a sound administration
which boasted good filing systems including records of membership and of the benefit
payments to which each member was entitled.79
Micwu bargained in the National Industrial Council for the Motor Industry (Nicmi)
which was formed in 1952. By 1979 employer parties to Nicmi consisted of the South
African Motor Industry Employers’ Association (Samiea) and the South African Vehicle
Builders’ and Repairers Association (Savbra), while the union members were Micwu, Mieu
and Misa.80 For years, the white unions had used the industrial council and the closed
shop to exclude Africans from skilled jobs and prevent them from undercutting white,
and to a lesser extent coloured and Indian, artisan pay. They negotiated the reservation of
skilled work for registered union members, which by law excluded Africans.
Micwu worked well with the white unions on the council. As East recalls: ‘We would
be a united voice. The negotiations were led by the president of Mieu. He was very racist
and conservative but he gave the workers a voice. We always worked together in a collective
spirit but not on training, that’s where employers always tried to split us.’
Misa and Mieu took a decision not to train coloured workers, and over time this took
on the force of law. In fact, the Apprenticeship Act of 1922 did not prevent workers of any
colour from signing an apprenticeship contract with an employer, but artisans fell under
the apprenticeship board and the Act provided for apprenticeship committees consisting
of organised white labour, employers and the department of labour. Mieu and Misa used
their seats on the committee to block employer applications to recruit African appren-
tices.81 Micwu was excluded from the committees (except in Natal).
Over time, coloured and Indian workers received training by other means. As white
artisans moved into white collar jobs, job reservation for coloured and Indian workers
was barely enforced, and they were often trained on the job. But African workers were
still excluded, an injustice in which Micwu collaborated. ‘We were coloured nationalists
in those days,’ commented the former Micwu regional secretary in Natal, Ekki Esau.
In the 1970s, Tucsa, again following the government’s lead, reopened its ranks to unreg-
istered unions and advised affiliates to form African parallels. Thus in the late 1970s
Micwu, observing changing trends, decided to recruit Africans into a parallel union.
Commented Esau: ‘Micwu formed a parallel union for African workers in about 1978
because we were a registered trade union and weren’t allowed to take in African members
at the time. Immediately the new legislation [the Wiehahn laws] came in 1980 we changed
our constitution to take in African workers.’
In the 1970s, however, Africans were second class members who could not be party to
a closed shop or reap the benefits of the industrial council system. In organising African
workers, Micwu ran up against Mawu, which was beginning to organise vehicle body
building firms in the Transvaal. Rivalry in some larger companies turned nasty as employ-
ers and the state strove to undermine Mawu’s emerging shop floor structures by promot-
ing liaison committees, industrial council bargaining and the recruitment of African
workers by Tucsa registered unions. At Henred Freuhauf on the East Rand in early 1980,
for example, where Mawu had majority support, management invited Micwu into the
factory to address workers. Mawu shop stewards recall this response:
[Ron] Webb [general secretary Micwu] was called in to address workers asking them to
join his parallel union. The meeting was held on the factory premises during working
hours. The workers emphatically rejected him. Management also tried to persuade workers
to either choose Webb’s parallel union or a company union rather than Mawu. Webb also
informed management that Mawu caused strikes, sought disruption and received money
from Russia and East Germany. The workers refused to resign..82
By the close of the 1970s much greater cooperation existed in the auto and engineering
sectors. In the motor sector, however, deep divisions remained.
Unity and organisational space

The independent unions (Mawu in the Transvaal, Micwu and WPMawu in the Western
Cape and Natal, UAW/Numarwosa in the Eastern Cape) had survived but remained small,
mainly local, isolated and fragmented. Mawu, for example, had organised just a tenth of
the 500 000 metal and engineering workforce.83 Unity was limited, and the unions’ power
to promote a broader social agenda was insignificant. Administrative capacity, particularly
in Mawu, was weak. It was the launch of Fosatu in 1979, and the coordination and soli-
darity it offered, which altered the terrain.
Numarwosa had remained outside any federation since its withdrawal from Tucsa in
1976. The idea of forging a new federation arose when its leadership raised the possibility
of merging Numarwosa and UAW. It arrived at the view that only through a unified
national federation could the independent unions survive and grow in the face of a hostile
state. In Durban it had made contact with Tuacc through the IMF Council, where it
discovered unionists with a similar sense of isolation and similar goals. As Erwin explained:
‘We felt isolated and we believed a national movement would give us greater protection.
Some people claimed unions like Numarwosa were bureaucratic because they were well
run, but we began to see that a union didn’t have to lose its militancy if it was run properly.
We believed we could learn from their style of unionism.’84 Tuacc had already debated
the possibility of a broader federation, so when Numarwosa broached the idea of unity it
resolved to play a spearheading role. Tuacc proposed a tight federation with common
policies underpinned by the principles of workers’ participation and political independ-
ence. A feasibility committee was established.85
The Western Province Workers Advice Bureau and the UTP unions decided to keep
their distance, the Western Cape grouping expressing a fear of Tuacc dominance and argu-
ing that workers should take the lead otherwise unity could only boost the power of offi-
cials.86 For the UTP unions, black leadership and the tightness of the proposed federation
were sticking points.87 But when a number of African UTP members discovered that their
leaders had not reported to them on the unity moves, they approached the feasibility com-
mittee independently and the result was that the Glass and Allied Workers Union, Paper
Wood and Allied Workers Union, SFAWU and a section of Eawu joined Fosatu.88
Sauls also approached WPMawu, which entered the new federation and supplied its
first president, Joe Foster.89 Micwu, however, was not interested. Explains East: ‘We were
still part of Tucsa. We were not in the IMF … and we were not organising the same mem-
bership. But we just didn’t like their leadership – Fred Sauls and Joe Foster.’
The groupings at the core of the unity thrust also decided to submit recommendations
for the reform of labour laws to the Wiehahn Commission. It was an important moment
in cementing their bond.90
Two years later, in April 1979, three registered and nine unregistered unions represent-
ing 45 000 workers launched Fosatu. It was the first national labour federation in South
Africa committed to building power through structures that ensured policy was controlled
by worker leadership. Policy dictated that the president and vice-president should be full-
time workers and that worker representatives to Fosatu structures should come from organ-
ised factories. It was a centralised federation which bound affiliates to common policies
Mawu delegation to Fosatu – Mawu’s first Transvaal organiser, Ellison Mohlabe, is standing in the back
row first left (Bernie Fanaroff)
and shared organising, administrative and educational resources. It was committed to

nonracial industrial unions based on worker control, shop floor organisation, independ-
ence, international worker solidarity and trade union unity.91 Sauls viewed it as ‘the major
achievement’92 of the 1970s, and in the 1980s, in the new environment of the Wiehahn
reforms, it would give a major boost to the weak black union movement.93
In the same year, another development gave the new unions a shot in the arm. On the
strength of the Wiehahn Commission’s recommendation that Africans be allowed to join
registered unions, three laws were promulgated between 1978 and 1981.94 They granted
Africans union rights, including admission to industrial councils and the right to legally
strike. The legislation also created the new category of unfair labour practice, to be defined
by an industrial court. A national manpower commission would monitor the new system
and advise the government.95
The Wiehahn laws were a major achievement for the independent unions. Their under-
stated organising methods had manoeuvred the state towards reform rather than repres-
sion and had thereby opened up new organising spaces. Tarrow has explored why
contentious politics only emerge in particular periods of history and why social move-
ments sometimes flourish and at other times vanish; he concludes that an important factor
is a shift in political opportunities and constraints, such changes occurring when the
authorities are vulnerable, allowing new opportunities to emerge which lower the cost of
action for ordinary people.96 The Wiehahn laws were such a catalyst in the emergence of
this new social movement unionism. Facing internal and external resistance amid eco-
nomic decline, the state’s aim was to incorporate and depoliticise the independent unions
through limited reform and the effect was to open organising space, which the new unions
would energetically exploit in the 1980s.
Despite some gains, the metal unions wielded limited power. Levels of unionisation
were low, recognition agreements minimal, and bargaining for improved wages and working
conditions underway in only a few factories. An impressive degree of internal cohesion
existed in these unions, but the huge task of integrating their different ideological, bureau-
cratic and organisational traditions had hardly been broached, nor was there yet the ability
to engage political parties or the captains of industry.
Perhaps least of all was their ability to wield institutional power. A massive organisa-
tional drive needed to happen before they would have the power ‘to shape the decision-
making agenda’97 and be able to influence the rules and regulations that affected their
members. It remained to be seen whether they could use the new industrial relations
regime to their advantage and whether their strategies would enhance their influence in
the bargaining, legislative and political arenas.
The significance of trends established by these unions in the 1970s were important in
laying the foundations for building power in the 1980s. Future power lay in the choice of
national industrial unionism and organisation resting on strong, accountable shop steward
structures which had been entrenched by the close of the 1970s.98 A new type of organiser,
too, was emerging in the late 1970s. Shop stewards who were dismissed for union activities
became powerful organisers owing to their shared background with those they sought to
recruit. The surfacing of such organisers combined with the focus on worker control,
allowed for the emergence of strong factory leadership and organic worker intellectuals.
Finally, the seeds of a national metal union had been sown with the spread of organisation
into all the main industrial centres – Johannesburg, Pretoria, the East Rand, Durban,
Pietermaritzburg, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and East London.
The survival of unions such as UAW/Numarwosa and Mawu was linked to their inno-
vative approaches, the range of tactics they employed and the flexibility of their organising
strategies. This mode of operation was to serve them well in the rapidly changing envi-
ronment of the 1980s.
By the end of the 1970s, the metal unions were poised to grow and exert power in more
significant ways. There was a keen appreciation of the need to consolidate and expand. In
that decade the key to survival had rested on the maintenance of an unobtrusive, inde-
pendent organisational and political profile but in the 1980s this strategy would be
contested. To have a decisive impact, the unions needed to increase their membership
while maintaining high levels of factory organisation so that metal employers nationwide
experienced a sustained assault.

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METAL

NATIONAL UNION OF METALWORKERS

Wits University Press

Copyright © Kally Forrest 2011

First published 2011

Edited by Monica Seeber

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS vii

CHAPTER ONE Building local power: 1970s 5

CHAPTER TWO Power through numbers: 1980–1985 35

CHAPTER THREE Power in unity: 1980–1987 59

CHAPTER FOUR Breaking the apartheid mould: 1980–1982 76

CHAPTER FIVE Worker action fans out: 1980–1984 96

CHAPTER SIX Melding institutional, campaign and 119

CHAPTER SEVEN Conquest of Metal Industrial Council: 1987–1988 146

CHAPTER EIGHT Auto workers take power: 1982–1989 164

CHAPTER NINE Auto takes on the industry: 1990–1992 182

CHAPTER TEN New directions: 1988–1991 204

CHAPTER ELEVEN Defeat of Mawu strategy: 1990–1992 224

CHAPTER TWELVE Towards a new industry: 1993 241

CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Cinderella sector: 1983–1990 259

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Applying vision in auto and motor: 1990–1995 276

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Applying vision in engineering: 1994–1995 294

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Independent worker movement: 1980–1986 320

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Beginnings of alliance politics: 1984–1986 336

CHAPTER NINETEEN Civil war in Transvaal: 1989–1994 393

CHAPTER TWENTY New politics: 1987–1990 416

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Disinvestment: Pragmatic politics 1985–1989 444

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Compromising on socialism: 454

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 550

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

AAC Alexandra Action Committee

GFWBF General Factory Workers’ Benefit Fund

NBF National Bargaining Forum

SADF South African Defence Force

A furnace is like a large oven powered by elec-

Building local power: 1970s

Segregated toilets at Iscor in Vanderbijlpark, 1992 (W Matlala)

Semi-skilled machine operator (Lesley Lawson)

The 1970s: new light

Durban strikers in 1973 (unknown)

Independent: Metal and Allied Workers Union

Everything was workers’ control. Everything had to be discussed at a general meeting.

If the role of white intellectuals in Tuacc was

group favoured links with the national liberation

The IAS developed close ties with Tuacc and the

Workers sit on benches in a makeshift hall (Numsa)

Tucsa dissidents: Numarwosa, UAW, WPMawu, Eawu

subsidiary, in 1976. Meeting resistance, they

demand recognition. Gloria Barry, a former

Alec [Erwin, of Mawu] came to IMF meetings

paid up membership was 3 000; its signed up

In Tucsa: Motor Industry Combined Workers Union

Unity and organisational space

and shared organising, administrative and educational resources. It was committed to

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