It was suggested in Part 1 that craft unionism depends upon the capacity of the union to restrict entry into the job. In Chapter 3 it was shown how, under the pressure of technical change, the craft skill of the moulder was diluted and the union was forced to open its membership to non-craftsmen. Further undermining of their privileged position forced the moulders to redefine themselves in racial terms by introducing de facto job reservation in the 1968 Industrial Council agreement. However, faced by a systematic onslaught from employers to open up ‘skilled jobs’ to Africans, and being unable to provide them with union members, the unions were forced to allow non-union (i.e. black) workers to take the new positions. Yet opening union jobs to non-union members could only make the registered unions even less representative of a semi-skilled work force which threatened to lower the standards of the skilled men. As had happened sixty years earlier in the United Kingdom, the opening of the ‘closed unions’ became an imperative for survival. ‘Since the general conditions of effective closed unionism are an occupational stability on the part of the workers it organizes and a system of restricting entry to their jobs’, observes Turner, ‘the most obvious cause of such a transformation in a closed union’s character is a technical change which undermines the permanence or blurs the identity of its members’ occupation.’ He concludes that ‘whether the union will in fact then modify itself depends largely on the pace of the technical revolution with which it is confronted’.

Yet the victory of the imperatives of technical change is not guaranteed, at least not in the short term. It has been shown that privileged workers were able to retain their ‘standard’ through transforming the closed shop into de facto job reservation. Two unions, the Y & S and to a lesser extent the AEU, have continued this racial strategy, refusing to open their unions to blacks. This chapter is concerned with three of the craft-diluted engineering unions which, faced by a crisis in craft control, and taking advantage of the change in state strategy, opened up their membership to Africans. The lever employers used to persuade the craft unions to open was the threat of a skill shortage. However this threat concealed an attempt to increase the productivity of labour. All three unions, in opening their ranks, have attempted to retain control by the established unions — either through parallel unions, as in the case of the South African Electrical Workers’ Association (SAEWA), or by restructuring one union into separate racial branches, as has happened in SABS and the IMS. But whereas SABS attempted to transform itself into an industrial union, the IMS showed little interest in expansion, concerned simply to retain its restricted entry and content to survive as a small union. Whether SABS is likely to achieve its expansionary objectives or the IMS its restrictive objectives will be assessed in Part III. Significantly, the IMS is able to contemplate restricted survival because it is able to limit entry into the job through a double closed shop.

The foundations for an analysis of the transformation of the labour process were laid over a century ago by Marx in Volume I of Capital. It is thus appropriate to begin with an exposition of that forbidding, unavoidable book. This chapter is not, however, an exercise in social theory so much as an attempt to provide the non-specialist reader with an understanding of the concepts which constitute the theoretical ground of this study.

Capitalism exists when the process of production is organized in terms of a market on which commodities, including labour itself, are bought and sold according to standards of monetary exchange. Such a process emerges when a class of men and women who do not own the means of production are forced to sell their labour power. In terms of the normal contract of employment the worker does not agree to do an exact amount of work; he surrenders his capacity to work and it is the task of management, through its hierarchy of control, to transform his capacity into actual productive activity. It is this process of transforming labour power into productive activity that is central to capitalism, and yet it is at the same time hidden. Let us therefore ‘leave this noisy sphere of the market’ and examine ‘the hidden abode of production’.

Let us begin ‘by stating the first premise of all human existence, and therefore of all history; the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to make history. But life involves before anything else, eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself.’ The process of producing the material means to satisfy these needs — ‘purposeful activity aimed at the production of use values’ — Marx calls ‘the labour process’. The labour process is a universal condition of human existence and is not in itself peculiar to capitalism.

Early craft production in the foundry was monopolized by European immigrants who had learnt the technique of union protection in the period of intense struggle against deskilling in their home countries. These craft moulders were to become a privileged stratum of the foundry labour force — a labour aristocracy. Blacks, on the other hand, had been subordinated in the late nineteenth century through colonial conquest and were now entering wage labour on a weak and unorganized basis. They were to enter the foundry as unskilled migrant labourers whose prolonged absence from their rural homes was to lead to the progressive deterioration of the productive capacity of these areas, creating a growing reserve army of labour dependent on wage labour. The division of labour that was to emerge in the early foundries was thus shaped by the differential proletarianization of black and white workers rooted in the colonial origins of South African society. The colour of craft was white and those who performed the subordinate labouring jobs were black. However, the beginnings of mass production were to transform the labour process, breach craft control, and open up job opportunities for ‘coloured’ machine operators. The central focus of Part I is on the response of the labour aristocracy of the foundry to these changes; in Parts II and III attention shifts to black workers increasingly at the centre of a transformed labour process.

Part II suggested that the contradictions generated by capitalist development, in particular the transition to monopoly capitalism, created a crisis of control in work relations. This crisis operated on two levels. On one level capital’s need to increase the productivity of labour was limited by the success of the diluted craft unions in maintaining a monopoly over certain jobs. The increasing dilution of these jobs, previously held by whites, made the opening of the ‘closed’ unions a necessity for the protection of jobs. The withdrawal of state support for the racial exclusion of blacks from the Industrial Council system provided the opportunity for the IMS to open its membership to blacks.

The more significant crisis of control over work relations in the foundry arose from the racially despotic nature of management’s control over black labour. As reliance on the white supervisor and his induna gave way to more sophisticated control through management-initiated liaison committees, growing resistance was encountered from organized black metal workers. Responding to the presence of a growing number of semi-skilled black workers in the industry, black unions emerged in the early 1970s. Yet management’s strategy of preempting the union through the liaison committee, facilitated by the tactics of ‘fear and smear’, inhibited the transition of black metal workers from phase two (the struggle for recognition) to phase three (negotiating and maintaining an agreement). It was, ultimately, the popular struggle in the townships in 1976 that widened the nature of the crisis, forcing capital and the state to search for new forms of social control in the workplace.

It has been shown — in Chapter 7 — that the engineering craft unions opened their membership to blacks, a development that will now be considered further. Meanwhile, how have the other trade unions which are party to the National Industrial Council (NIC) responded to the tentative attempts at deracializing the industrial relations system in the period of the Wiehahn Commission and after?

The first response from a union within the NIC — Yster en Staal — expressed a keen sense of betrayal. ‘To my mind’, said Wessels Borman, general secretary of the Y & S:

Although the Y & S was supportive of the National Party in the early apartheid period, after the 1960s it placed less faith in the state as the guardian of its position. Some members of the Y & S had shifted their support from the National Party to the Herstigte Nasionale Party (HNP). When statutory job reservation failed, as in the engineering industry of the early 1960s, they were forced to accept the necessity of ‘African advancement’, and sought to control the pace of change by demanding that white workers were either retrained or promoted to supervisory positions. This phase culminated in the 1978 Agreement which, it was suggested in Chapter 7, increasingly relocated white workers to supervisory positions.

A recent paper applied labour market theory to South Africa, formulating a model of racial dualism. Cassim postulates

The racial dualism of the South African labour market is illustrated, he argues, by an examination of the occupational distribution of different race groups.

The conclusion to be drawn from Part I of this study is that craft workers resisted the process of deskilling and thus retained considerable control over the supply of labour at the level of the firm and the industry. Craft workers attempted to maintain the exclusivity of the trade well after technological change had rendered craft skill redundant by contesting the definition of skill. Colour and craft coincided, and the vulnerability created by the challenge from cheaper non-union black labour gave craft exclusivity a racial form. Craft workers, with institutional leverage in the industrial relations system, relied on this privileged access to entrench the exclusivity inherent within craft unions along lines similar to those described by Penn and discussed in Chapter 1. The result was the survival of a higher number of ‘craft’ jobs than the deskilling thesis would appear to indicate. This, it is suggested in Part II, was to contribute to a crisis of control in work relations in the 1970s.

In the early days of small-scale foundry production in South Africa employers were able to exercise authority directly on the shop floor, through the entrepreneur himself or through the craftsmen. During this phase, craft workers exercised a significant degree of control over the job through the closed shop and the apprenticeship system. In some respects these craft workers acted as the foremen in hierarchical control; for example, it was customary in early foundry production for craftsmen to hire their own ‘helpers’. But employers were able to break the control of the craftsmen by job fragmentation and deskilling, introducing what in Chapter 1 we called ‘technical control’. By the end of the 1960s a growing number of craftsmen had been transformed into supervisors performing a control function in the workplace.

As a consequence of this abdication of managerial authority to the supervisor, industrial relations had been a neglected managerial function in the foundry in the pre-Wiehahn period.

Up to the outbreak of the Second World War, the engineering industry in South Africa was essentially a jobbing and repair industry and did not, with the exception of a few establishments, engage in the manufacture of engineering supplies. In the early years, before South Africa’s base mineral wealth was known, it was dependent on the importation of its requirements and was confined largely to the coastal areas. The earliest recorded foundry, Cape Foundry, was advertising its products, such as church bells, as early as 1831. Foundries also existed in Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown, Durban and Pietermaritzburg. The discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and gold on the Witwatersrand led to the spread of the engineering industry inland. However, prior to 1900 the 189 establishments that existed were either repair shops or blacksmith shops.

It was in the context of this simple division of labour between artisans and unskilled workers that the Iron Moulders Society of South Africa was established on 25 September 1896 as a craft union ‘for the protection of the trade of iron, brass and steel moulders in the case of oppression and accident’. At this stage of formal subordination ‘real control of production is not yet firmly in the hands of capital. It is still a relationship between labour and the conditions of labour which provides labour with a degree of control and hence a lever with which to enforce its class objectives — [which may be] craft prerogatives over recruitment into the trades and over the content and performance of work’. A craftsman exercises control over production through his possession of the instruments of production, that is, the tools of the trade, which are an extension of his hands and over which he attempts to maintain exclusive control. Three tools are central to the moulder’s trade — the trowel and the heart-and-squeeze, used for sleeking, and the cleaner, used for blacking into the mould.

This book has shown how capital’s attempt to homogenize and deskill the labour process in South African foundries was resisted by workers, and how a key role was played by the craft unions through the mechanism of social closure. In South Africa craft workers possessed institutional leverage in the industrial relations system and were able to use this privileged access to entrench the exclusivity inherent within craft unionism. The specificity of the South African labour process lies in the explicitly racial form taken by social closure. Capitalist development did not, in the short term, lead to an undermining of the racial order; instead it led, as shown in Part I, to an intensification of the racial division of labour in the foundry.

However, the contradictions generated by capitalist development, and in particular by the transition to monopoly capitalism, created a crisis of control in work relations. Changes in the labour process led to a shift in the balance of power: the decline of the ‘labour aristocrat’ saw the rise of the production worker. As a consequence a new form of workplace organization emerged — the industrial union, which through the strategic location of its members in the labour process was able to challenge the traditional forms of control in the foundry. Faced by the challenge described in Part II, the state withdrew formal support for racial exclusion and embarked upon an experiment to incorporate black workers into the industrial relations system (the Wiehahn solution). Part III showed how this incorporative strategy has been challenged ‘from below’ by demands that the shop steward structure be involved in negotiations and that factory-level bargaining take place. These demands have now widened, moving the frontier of control beyond production to the reproduction of the workforce — from the politics of production to global politics. This raises the difficult and unresolved question of the relationship between workplace organization and the wider popular struggle. To illustrate the complex nature of the interaction between divisions within the working class, the labour process, and workplace organization, we need to return to the ‘five faces’ introduced in Chapter 1. Through these five working lives — Bob, Len, Morris, Sipho, and Josias — we hope to provide an illustration, in capsule form, of the main themes of the study.

All three responses to deracialization in the post-Wiehahn period dealt with in Chapter 10 — the racial exclusivity of the Y & S and the AEU, the multi-racial approach of SAEWA, the IMS and SABS, and the formation of the independent, black SEAWU — share a commitment to the maintenance of the Industrial Council system. The responses dealt with in this chapter are different in that they oppose the present Industrial Council system and aim instead at direct involvement of the shop floor in industrial relations. Unions which share this approach differ as to how it can best be conducted — and these differences exist within as well as between unions. In particular, divergent views exist on what the relationship ought to be between the work place and the wider popular struggle in South Africa — as can be seen in the various strategies of the GWU, GAWU, BAWU and now UMMAWOSA, all of whom have members in the engineering industry. However, the great majority of organized black foundry workers, an estimated 25 percent of the industry, belong to MAWU, the largest of the expansionary unions. We will focus in this chapter on the strategy of MAWU in the post-Wiehahn period.

In the early 1970s an intense debate took place in South Africa on economic growth and its relationship to social and political change. The debate polarized into two opposing views. One view suggested that economic growth would break down apartheid. Industrialization would lead to liberalization. This, the ‘conventional’ view as expounded most consistently by O’Dowd, was challenged by the ‘revisionist’ thesis advanced by Johnstone and others which suggested that capitalist development was reinforcing ‘white supremacy’. Although these two views reached opposite conclusions, they started from the same basic premise: an exclusive focus on the dominant institutions and groups in South Africa. Whereas in the first view these groups were seen as more or less inevitable agents of change, the ‘revisionist’ case was that they were more or less irremovable obstacles to change. Neither view recognized sufficiently the possibility of organizations emerging, notably from the black working class, that could take advantage of the contradictions generated by capitalist development to influence the pace and direction of change.

In the post-Wiehahn period the centre of the industrial relations stage shifted unequivocally towards these emerging unions. Drawing largely on unskilled and semi-skilled black, predominantly African workers, these unions have expanded rapidly since 1979. While recruitment has been rapid the total membership is still small at approximately 400 000. Their significance, however, lies in the fact that, for the first time in South Africa, they have laid the foundations of national, mass-based unionism within the core of the manufacturing industry — the metal, motor, textile, food, paper, and chemical sectors — as well as in the retail, mining and transport industries. If we include the 800 000 workers who are members of the established unions, nearly 1200 000 workers (12,2% of the economically active population) now belong to trade unions in South Africa.

An important feature of the emerging unions is their concentration on building shop steward structures in selected workplaces. They now have an organized presence in over 750 workplaces, while in 420 of these formal agreements have been signed between management and the unions representing workers in that plant. Shop stewards, now numbering over 6000, and their committees have become the pivot of the organizational structures of these unions.

In the early 1970s African workers began to organize into trade unions, and thus to challenge the dualistic structure of industrial relations. This chapter is concerned with management’s resistance to these early attempts to organize. By 1977, however, management and the state had been forced to recognize and negotiate with the new unions.

It is possible to identify three phases in the growth of a trade union. During the initial phase of recruitment, the task of the union is to get members to join. During the second phase the problem is that of winning recognition from management. During the third phase, the union attempts to negotiate and maintain an agreement that ensures workers’ rights in the factories.

The problem facing an emerging union is how to move from phase one to phase three, or, as Flanders puts it, how to convert temporary movement into permanent organization. In the early period of mobilization membership is loose; to sustain the impetus the union leaders must acquire sanctions to maintain continuous membership. The crucial phase of conversion takes place with recognition from employers so that the union is able to build up enduring relations with management in the form of collective bargaining.

A central problem in the development of black trade unions in South Africa has been the rupturing of the process of maturation by the failure to win management recognition, as well as by state hostility and registered trade union indifference. Before the 1970s there had been three major thrusts towards African unionization in South Africa’s labour history — in the 1920s; during World War II; and in the 1950s and early 1960s. Each wave of unionization was followed by repressive legislation: the state’s response in the 1920s was the Industrial Conciliation Act, excluding Africans from formal collective bargaining, and the Native Administration Act with its ‘racial hostility’ clause; the unions of the 1940s were countered by anti-strike legislation during the war, the Suppression of Communism Act, and the Bantu (Settlement of Disputes) Act; while the unions of the 1960s were hit early in the decade by the Unlawful Organizations Act and the General Laws Amendment Act. What seems to have happened in South Africa is that at each stage in the emergence of embryonic African trade unions, the process of maturation has been ruptured at a crucial point, and the unions have been unable to convert from a temporary movement into a permanent organization. The state, faced by the organization of African workers, chose repression rather than incorporation.

There are two ways of rewarding labour — either by paying for the time spent at work (time wages) or by paying for the amount of work performed (piece-work). Traditionally, as argued in Chapter 2, the work of the moulder was rewarded by time wages, the amount of work to be performed being set by custom. With the exception of South African Railways (where piece-work had been introduced before the First World War) and Durban Falkirk, the IMS had successfully resisted management’s attempts to introduce piece-work among moulders. As the chairman stated at the 1947 biennial conference, ‘We as a society have always been opposed to piece-work, our contention being “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” and with the piece-work system this was not a practical issue.’

The way to avoid the piece-work trap discussed in Chapter 2 was simply, the society argued, to avoid piece-work altogether. However, the demand for increased production during the Second World War led the state to intervene directly in production, creating the Controller of Manpower in 1941. In terms of War Measure No.6 of 1941 engineering, because of the crucial importance of munitions production, fell under the Controller of Manpower, who was empowered to determine wages, conditions of work, resignations, dismissals and transfers.

The regional nature of employer organization prevented the employers from developing a national strategy to combat worker unrest in the wake of the Controller of Manpower’s attempt to freeze wages, restrict the movement of skilled engineers and extend the working day.