Working as an organiser on the East Rand was the busiest time of my life,’ remembers Moses Mayekiso. ‘I had to cope sometimes with five strikes at a time, going around like a lunatic.’ Dealing with the strike upsurge of the early 1980s, and the demands of newly organised workers in a maze of individual factories, had pushed Mawu to its limits. It now turned to coping with this crisis through the use of power in more varied, complex and strategic ways. In this chapter the focus is on engineering which was chiefly organised by Mawu. This is an artificial spotlight as it does not reflect what was happening simultaneously in the metal sector and how organisation in one part of the industry was influencing and affecting another. The complexity of developments in each sector however makes it necessary to separate the strands of the union.

Mawu's early successes consisted in establishing a presence in factories, winning recognition and entrenching formal grievance, dismissal and retrenchment codes. In the area of wages, however, it had yet to develop a strategy that would ensure inflation-linked increases and real increases. It was in this respect that it began to focus on the National Industrial Council for the Iron, Steel, Engineering and Metallurgical Industries (Nicisemi), South Africa's largest statutory bargaining structure.

The council was organised in three broad tiers: a national forum, six regional councils and a national executive committee. The main agreement was negotiated at national level, while the regional councils administered it and dealt with such matters as employer exemptions and workplace inspections by council agents.

It offered a slow, bureaucratic dispute-resolving process beginning at regional level and, in deadlock, moving to the NEC. If agreement remained elusive, a full meeting of the council was called, and if the dispute was unresolved after three meetings a vote was taken on whether to refer it to arbitration or to the manpower minister as a prelude to a legal strike.The council's main job, however, was for organised labour and employers to negotiate minimum wages and conditions which were included in the annual main agreement whether or not factories were organised into trade unions.