33 results
2 - Precarious Work after Apartheid: Experimenting with Alternative Forms of Representation in the Informal Sector
- Edward Webster, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Lynford Dor, KU Leuven, Belgium
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- Recasting Workers' Power
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- Bristol University Press
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- 23 January 2024
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- 17 July 2023, pp 30-54
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The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) had been at the centre of the internal struggle for democracy since its formation. Therefore, expectations were high in 1994 among its members that South Africa's first democratic government would usher in a worker-friendly labour regime. But from the beginning, the new labour regime proved complex and contested. For employers, labour market flexibility became a mantra as they grappled with intensified global competition. For labour, however, democracy was not delivering on the expectations of more and better jobs, as employers were bypassing the new labour laws.
The world of work was changing and COSATU's membership was not diversifying significantly to include the growing numbers of outsourced, casual, migrant or informal sector workers. This became a concern to the federation as it felt the pressure of large-scale retrenchments and informalisation of employment practices. The labour relations system based on the traditional employer/employee binary was being eroded by labour broker intermediaries (Kenny and Webster, 1998). COSATU responded to these and other challenges in 1997 by setting up a Commission on the Future of Trade Unions, known as the September Commission (after Connie September, Deputy President of COSATU at the time).
Chapter 7 of the September Commission report focused on the rise of vulnerable work and made recommendations on how COSATU should respond. The report categorised vulnerable work into four areas: vulnerable sectors, vulnerable layers of workers (in all sectors), the informal sector, and migrant workers. The report recommended that COSATU commit to the ‘strategic objective’ of organising against vulnerable work on all levels and warned against the consequences of not doing so. For example, it argued that should COSATU not organise in vulnerable sectors its ‘position in the labour market would be weakened, and this would be likely to affect its influence at a political level, and at NEDLAC [National Economic Development and Labour Council]’. Furthermore, if it did not organise ‘vulnerable layers’ of workers in the formal sector, the report warned that ‘COSATU could end up being based in a shrinking section of the working class, as has happened to trade unions in a number of countries’ (COSATU, 1997: Chapter 7).
Despite the report's warnings, over the decades that followed COSATU, and the trade union movement more generally, failed to respond adequately to the rise of precarious and vulnerable work in all its forms.
List Of Abbreviations and Acronyms
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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- Wits University Press
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- 23 March 2018
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- 27 November 2011, pp vii-x
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Introduction
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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- 27 November 2011, pp 1-4
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Chapter Eighteen - Weakening the socialist impulse: Civil war in Natal 1987–1994
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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- Wits University Press
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- 23 March 2018
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- 27 November 2011, pp 365-392
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Between 1987–1994 an evolutionary change in Numsa's politics unfolded, expressing itself in a dilution of the union's socialist aspirations. The draining of Cosatu's and Numsa's socialist politics was in part due to the hegemony that the ANC asserted from the mid-1980s and was also related to developments within alliance politics. The other significant factor was the escalation of Inkatha violence from the late 1980s.
Superficially the ideological underpinnings of the opposed forces in the civil conflict that erupted could be characterised as capitalist versus socialist/revolutionary. Here the state and Inkatha would be characterised as the pro-capitalist force and Cosatu – and to a lesser extent the UDF and ANC – as the socialist and revolutionary forces. This was indeed how much of business characterised the camps prior to the growing contact that it established with the ANC in the late 1980s. In reality, the civil war in Natal was to draw Cosatu and the ANC closer but this was not to cement a revolutionary socialist alliance; it was rather to draw Cosatu and its most socialist union Numsa further from their socialist mission. The Cosatu/Numsa alliance with the ANC centred on a paradox. Cosatu sought an alliance with the ANC because of the latter's popular support and historical legitimacy which conferred strength on its worker constituency, including the muscle to pursue a socialist agenda. At the same time it prompted a counter-revolutionary attack which mainly took the form of civil conflict. The attack failed in one respect – the overt goal of preventing the ANC alliance from seizing political power. But it succeeded in another sense since it demobilised most of the organs of popular power, whose vitality was essential to underwriting a socialist project, so the opportunity for a deeper socialist transformation was lost.
Uneasy truce: Fosatu and Inkatha
From the mid-1980s, Cosatu and the UDF faced growing opposition from Inkatha in the form of verbal attacks mainly opposing disinvestment and Fosatu and Cosatu stayaways.
Chapter Seventeen - Beginnings of alliance politics: 1984–1986
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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- Wits University Press
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- 23 March 2018
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- 27 November 2011, pp 336-364
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In 1984, the popular challenge to the apartheid state reached new intensity. By late 1982, black community struggles for better education and basic township services had moved to the Transvaal. The UDF began a campaign against Nationalist reforms which seriously undermined the government's political programme and positioned the UDF as the dominant internal opponent to apartheid. Embracing the ANC's call to make townships ‘ungovernable’, it urged the building of ‘organs of people's power’ through street committees and ‘people's courts’.At the same time, thousands of black pupils boycotted schools in protest against ‘gutter education’ demanding ‘people's education for people's power’. By August 1984, many schools were permanently on boycott, and students fought running battles with police who responded using teargas, birdshot, rubber bullets and live munition.
In 1983 Cosas (Congress of South African Students) had established a presence in Katlehong. It was launched in 1979 to represent black school students nationally, and was affiliated to the UDF. By 1984 it was the largest youth organisation on the East Rand and 556 of its activists had been detained. Cosas brought the struggle for decent education into workers’ homes and parents began to support their children's struggles and to enter community organisations. In addition, by 1983 South Africa was in recession. Unemployment, rising prices, low wages, squatter removals and rising rents were issues workers now confronted.
Battles on the education front ignited other townships. When local authorities raised rents to finance township infrastructure, communities rose to challenge the entire system of local government. Struggles against councils became progressively more violent as community and youth organisations clashed with the police, and later the armed forces. Councillors fled townships and the black local government system collapsed.
UDF affiliates were central to these struggles which brought the ANC exile movement back to the centre of resistance politics. The government responded by declaring successive states of emergency and the South African Defence Force (SADF) occupied most townships. The mobilisation of the army reflected the growing presence of the military in state affairs. When black councils collapsed, the SADF activated joint management centres (JMCs), established in 1979, to regain control of townships. These were in turn linked to the State Security Council accountable to State President, PW Botha.
Chapter Nineteen - Civil war in Transvaal: 1989–1994
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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- 23 March 2018
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- 27 November 2011, pp 393-415
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One of Numsa's signal achievements had been to foster national solidarity among metal workers. Fantasia has pointed to the primacy of unity as a source of power, viewing ‘militance and solidarity’ as the ‘base of working class power’. Allen argues that it is through unity that socialism expresses its opposition to capitalism. ‘Solidarity, equality and democracy express the antithesis of capitalist values … individualism, the core of capitalist activity, is confronted by collectivism.’ In the early 1990s, however, the union was to confront deep worker divisions in the Pretoria /Witwatersrand/ Vaal (PWV) area, sparked by violence which claimed at least 14 000 lives. Macun details racial cleavages and the rate of unemployment as affecting the capacity of the working class to unify itself, access power and forge common interests in relation to other classes. In Numsa, working class power was weakened by the fracturing of solidarity along ethnic, and migrant versus urban, cleavages.
As in Natal, Inkatha was central to the Transvaal upheavals. The TRC report notes its involvement in 75 per cent of violent incidents. But Inkatha was only able to foment conflic t because of a deep instability in township, hostel and squatter communities. Noting a pattern of urban township violence since the late 1800s in the Transvaal, Kynoch observes that ‘politicised rivalries found fertile ground for escalation partially because a culture of violence was already ingrained.’ From 1989 until the 1994 elections, a cycle of violence and counter-violence became an entrenched feature of township and, in some cases, factor y life.
In the late 1980s previously good relations between Transvaal township residents and hostel dwellers came under strain. After the repeal of the pass laws in 1986, there was an influx of unemployed residents into hostels where conditions had declined because of local government neglect, and at the same time retrenchments on the East Rand and in the reserves offered little relief to jobless migrants facing overgrazed land and widespread stock theft. As Bonner et al comment, ‘the migrant lifestyle was thus being corroded at both rural and urban ends … An incendiary situation existed in the hostels.’
Appendix
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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- 23 March 2018
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- 27 November 2011, pp 481-486
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Writing in 1959, Robert Michels argued that despite an early emphasis on participatory democracy in unions, their structure ultimately resolves itself into an oligarchy; a growing complexity in organisational structure, including the development of an administrative bureaucracy, results in a division of labour as professional leaders enter the union and as a skilled hierarchy emerges, ordinary members lose control.
Richard Lester, writing at the same time, looked at organised labour in the United States and advanced a similar theory: at first, rank and file participation is high as the union fights for its existence but later, as it wins rights and establishes bargaining institutions, a goal displacement occurs; a larger specialised bureaucracy emerges; and skilled national leaders grow in power and become distanced from rank and file. The union comes to identify more closely with the goals of management than of members. Institutionalised bargaining constrains grassroots participation through the introduction of procedures in order to stave off spontaneous industrial action. Power and influence are wielded in a less conflictual manner and internal democracy is reduced.
Colin Crouch, writing in the 1970s and early 1980s, contends that union power lies in collective action, particularly strikes, but he emphasises labour's weakness in relation to employers and the many factors which can undermine strikes. In the management of conflict, he sees a gap between the national union centre and grassroots membership. Members may accept national participation if it produces direct gains but a strong shop floor movement may also rupture national understandings with government or employers to deliver industrial peace if it cannot see benefits. Members may resist trading wage restraint for other guarantees and rights or a longer-term income rise. Crouch's point is that the national centre acts as a guarantor of members’ long-term interests, while the power of the labour movement may lie in its decentralised, mass participatory character. In this paradox, he sees the failing of the contemporary labour movement.
Theorists have argued over the relationship between power and coercion.
Chapter Twelve - Towards a new industry: 1993
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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- 23 March 2018
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- 27 November 2011, pp 241-258
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‘Numsa wants to approach bargaining as a process and not an event any more!’ declared Numsa Info in the wake of the devastating 1992 engineering strike. Adversarial bargaining held the danger of destroying the industry, but its limits were also revealing themselves in other ways.
In its early years, Numsa had built power through a focussed living wage campaign which had resulted in metal workers flocking to join, and in Numsa's becoming the dominant union in the industry. By the early 1990s, however, it could no longer sustain this tactic, as national organiser Marie explained: ‘We did it for a while, and it exhausted us because the logistics were enormous. We did achieve some significant things but it reached its limit.’
By the early 1990s, Numsa's ‘shopping list of demands’ was making negotiations overly long and complex. Smith recalled: ‘They [Nicisemi] have this preliminary meeting with all the unions present, and we basically motivate our proposal – this goes on for weeks. And the serious bargaining only takes place towards the end of June, and the agreement is about to expire; now people start getting serious.’ In negotiations Numsa dropped half of its demands, and after the agreement was signed there was little time left in the year to implement it. ‘You'd start at the beginning of the year, until about August/September finalising, then three months and you're back on the treadmill,’ said Geoff Schreiner. The union was caught in a cycle of tabling and dropping demands, only to retable them the following year.
This frustrating cycle led it to consider a three-year agreement which allowed for a reasonable bargaining period and provided time for implementation. Thus the ‘three-year bargaining programme’ originated as an organising tool but later became linked to Numsa's emerging ideas on industrial restructuring.
Debating restructuring
From 1990, the union began holding policy workshops on the economy. These discussions led Numsa to believe that the macroeconomy, the metal industry and the shop floor were connected in ways that required centralised bargaining and could not be addressed at the workplace alone.
Chapter Fifteen - Applying vision in engineering: 1994–1995
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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- 23 March 2018
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- 27 November 2011, pp 294-319
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Progress in auto was made through the 1995 agreement, but in engineering, the three-year strategy began to unravel. Numsa was confronted with having to build workers’ control in an environment which did not lend itself to the slow, incremental workings that internal union democracy required. Also, its failure to communicate ideas from the research and development groups in 1990, on which much of the threeyear bargaining programme was based, came back to haunt it.
The early 1990s was a dangerous time for Numsa and for workers. The union was embroiled in intense ideological, political, organisational and bargaining complexities. It remained to be seen if Numsa could win real power for its constituency, or if history would record a weak response at a critical time.
Leadership and organisational weakness
It was in engineering that the strongest expectations of wielding power lay, and where the complexity and contradictions were most sharply expressed. It was here that Numsa had experienced its most rapid expansion, which contributed to the intricacy of its organisational and bargaining approaches. Chris Lloyd believed that the union did not acknowledge important differences between engineering and auto and so neglected a large body of members, and that this weakened its ability to implement its new strategy. He commented:
It seems strange to me that you go to a policy workshop on bargaining and less than 20 000 auto workers dominate, and 150 000 engineering workers, the bulk of our membership, hardly get a say.
We overplay the importance of the auto industry. I remember the auto agreement in 1995 got pages of news coverage, and yet it only covers 25 000 members. And yet the engineering agreement that was signed in 1996, which covers 250 000 people, I don't remember a column of news. That reflects a real bias in the union, employers and government against this industry … We've allowed the union to think that the auto industry is of equal weight with the engineering industry, where our real potential to grow is. If we're going to export anything from South Africa, it's not built-up cars. It's components, tooling, equipment, parts.
Metal that Will not Bend
- The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, 1980-1995
- Kally Forrest
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- Wits University Press
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- 23 March 2018
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- 27 November 2011
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In the 1980s there was a surge of trade union power in South Africa. The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) was prominent and innovative in this assertion of muscle.Metal that does not Bend traces Numsa’s accumulation, from a few small unions in a handful of factories to the staging of national strikes involving thousands of workers in auto and engineering. It examines how the union used its influence in macroeconomic and political arenas. Numsa was Cosatu’s most radical socialist affiliate, and the book explores its attempts to implement its vision. Historians have framed apartheid’s downfall as resulting from the activities of the exiled liberation movement, global anti-apartheid boycott strategies and internal township insurrection. This book reasserts the critical role of the internal labour movement.
Chapter Ten - New directions: 1988–1991
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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- 23 March 2018
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- 27 November 2011, pp 204-223
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After establishing itself as the major bargaining partner in engineering, following the 1988 ‘strategic strike’, Numsa turned to serious engagement on the Nicisemi.
The engineering industry was hardest hit by the economic slump. By 1989 employment had not returned to 1981 levels despite higher outputs. Many engineering companies had rebuilt their operations and raised productivity by introducing new technology and employing fewer workers who were expected to produce more. It was against this background that Numsa's engineering sector achieved some of its most progressive bargaining outcomes and experienced some of its most significant defeats.
In 1989 Numsa entered engineering industrial council talks as the most powerful of 15 union parties, with 115 000 members in an industry of 360 000. It was no longer possible for the manpower minister to gazette agreements without Numsa as a signatory, or for the union to use Mawu's tactic of exiting talks without signing. Numsa now held the responsibility of strengthening the Nicisemi and ensuring its survival.
Numsa came to the table intent on negotiating more than wages – it wanted to open a dialogue with employers on job security, job creation, training and a social security net. In the words of its president, Dube, ‘Capital has attacked the workers to cut their costs. The first thing they are attacking is job security. We have seen more and more permanent workers replaced by temporary workers. A lot of work is sub-contracted … if we don't defeat this attack, money won't help – because you will be unemployed anyway … it will be very short-sighted if we just concentrate always on money.’
The metal unions had tried to stem retrenchments by negotiating procedures at the plant. Now Numsa aimed to address structural unemployment at industry level and challenge the employers’ unilateral approach to company restructuring. Explained Smith:
We set job security as the major theme, stop all retrenchments! Because the flood gates were opening. We were just losing jobs all over the place. So the critical demands were severance pay and job security. So the idea was now we were trying to set a national framework that would force companies to seriously negotiate … That year, [1989] we started introducing a motivation with a general economic context. Talked a bit about restructuring and started engaging the employers a little bit more.
Chapter Seven - Conquest of Metal Industrial Council: 1987–1988
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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- 23 March 2018
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- 27 November 2011, pp 146-163
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The year 1987 was a period of unprecedented strike activity in the labour movement, including in Numsa, partly because of a short-lived recovery in manufacturing. The country was also in the grip of a state of emergency. Township community organisation had been crushed through the banning of meetings, widespread detentions, restrictions on individuals, night curfews making meetings difficult, and a police and military presence in townships which stamped out organisation through intimidation and arrests.
Into this political vacuum, Cosatu spearheaded internal opposition and became a target. Its Johannesburg headquarters were bombed and attacks on union offices became more common. Striking railway workers were shot on the street, tough union restrictions were introduced in an amendment to the Labour Relations Act, and Cosatu was restricted from engaging in political activity. Inevitably, government's spirit of no compromise coloured Nicisemi talks. With a larger, better-resourced union still committed to the living wage campaign, Numsa members mobilised around 1987 Industrial Council negotiations.
Council talks opened with the IMF unions again tabling common demands. As 300 union supporters, including shop steward chairs from every former Mawu engineering plant, looked on, Numsa demonstrated the extent to which large companies which dominated the metal industry were making profits well above the inflation rate – the average earnings of 144 companies which reported in February that year had risen by more than 30 per cent. Many had achieved this by restructuring their operations through the introduction of new technology, working methods and retrenchments. Numsa told how, with the closure of many smaller factories, 110 000 metal jobs had been lost since 1982. Finally, the union argued that even the Household Subsistence Level, which was inadequate for workers’ needs, stood at R425,20 per month while the metal industry's minimum wage was R399,90. Numsa demanded a R4 an hour living wage.
Numsa's other demands echoed those of previous years and included a 40-hour week because through apartheid planning workers travelled an average of four hours a day, worked nine hours, slept seven and had a meagre four hours left in which to cater for domestic chores and leisure.
Chapter Five - Worker action fans out: 1980–1984
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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- 23 March 2018
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- 27 November 2011, pp 96-118
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In the early 1980s, Mawu and Naawu spread to all parts of the country. They typically established a presence in a new area by focussing on a large or influential factory where news of struggle spread to neighbouring factories and communities. Often, after these unions targeted a factory, a dispute erupted; the industrial action then served to raise the profile of unionisation in general and in these unions in particular; a cadre of new leaders then emerged who set out to recruit in neighbouring workplaces; once a sufficient number of workplaces were organised, they launched a new branch. In this way the metal unions pioneered expansion for themselves and other Fosatu unions.
Auto expansion
Before the 1980s, the auto industry was based mainly in the Eastern Cape and was dominated by large assembly plants. In 1985, these plants contributed 71 per cent of Naawu's paid-up membership. Largely dependent on auto assembly were the smaller tyre and rubber, and auto component sub-sectors. Tyre and rubber logically fell into auto components but it always remained more strongly linked to the assemblers sector.
Auto was smaller than other sectors in Numsa, in particular engineering. On Numsa's formation it had 24 000 members compared to motor's 40 000 and engineering's 70 000. Yet it occupied a strategic position in the Eastern Cape and national economy which enabled these workers to wield considerable power in the metal sector.
In the early 1980s, Numarwosa/UAW began to expand into other centres, particularly the northern Transvaal, where manufacturers such as Toyota, Sigma and BMW had moved in a cost-cutting exercise. Previously, auto assemblers had set up plants next to Port Elizabeth's working harbour where parts were shipped in; now the ‘just in time’ production system pioneered by the Japanese eliminated the use of warehouses to store excess supplies. This meant that components were flown directly to plants when required and it thus became possible for assemblers to relocate factories from harbour cities to the major markets of the Transvaal. Component manufacturers followed suit.
Index
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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- 27 November 2011, pp 551-566
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Chapter Eleven - Defeat of Mawu strategy: 1990–1992
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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- 23 March 2018
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- 27 November 2011, pp 224-240
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Numsa entered the 1990s confronted by a liberalisation of South African markets. A number of its larger companies adjusted to global competition through the introduction of new technology, reorganisation of production, outsourcing and inevitable retrenchments. The union organised a number of think-tanks in an effort to develop a strategy to counter this attack on workers’ living standards. A policy workshop in 1990 struck a new note by highlighting ‘challenges, opportunities and responsibilities in a society moving towards democracy’ and concluded that unions should ‘initiate and lead the formulation of economic policy, rather than simply respond to the initiatives of the state and management’.
This involved the development of policy on the restructuring of the macroeconomy, industry, and the workplace to create job security and jobs, ensure a living wage and meet the basic needs of the mass of South Africans. The union's aim was to shift the economy from the isolation and ‘inward industrialisation’ of apartheid to cope with global conditions and world markets. This would be achieved by ‘increasing the organised strength and consciousness, and the skills and control, of the working class, or it would never lead in the direction of socialism’.
Shifting bargaining agenda: 1990–1992
The 1990 metal industrial council talks took place against a shift in Numsa's collective bargaining. Addressing the February 1990 national bargaining conference, national organiser Fanaroff outlined two basic steps towards socialism: the building of organised working class power and the winning of demands to restructure the economy. ‘By bargaining at industry level,’ he explained, ‘we can start to restructure the economy. That is why Numsa demands for a new industry training scheme, and for more job security and job creation programmes, are so important.’ One way to address joblessness, Fanaroff declared, was to negotiate job creation programmes at industry level. Capital bore a large responsibility for the unemployment crisis because of its reluctance to invest profits in new manufacturing. He believed there were numerous opportunities to invest in innovative work-creating projects, especially in respect of everyday, useful goods for ordinary people.
Chapter One - Building local power: 1970s
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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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.’ 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 workplace 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 consisted 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 oppression 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 bourgeois ie and a new stage of working class struggle would begin. Trade unionism was thus important, but secondary, to liberation politics. As a result, the slow, painstaking construction of workplace democracy was neglected by the Sactu unions.
Chapter Three - Power in unity: 1980–1987
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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Our union organises mostly metal workers … This has made it easier to assist our workers efficiently with problems they face in the metal industry,’ explained a Mawu booklet. ‘At the same time our union does not believe in encouraging workers to become splintered in their organisations. That is why our union has always tried to work in close cooperation with other industrial unions which share our principles and to fight for broader working class unity.’
From the outset, the independent unions, through the coordination of Tuacc, had a vision of strong industrial unions where a national worker unity, and identity, could be forged. Bringing workers together in large industrial unions meant uniting people who were racially, ethnically and regionally divided across urban and rural areas and bantustans. Organisation nationally would restrict employers’ ability to exploit racial and regional differences in wages and working conditions. In view of the country's highly monopolised economy which brought many workers under the same ownership and linked them through interconnected production, this strategy made further sense.
Organising by industries also brought power. Strike action across the auto sector, for example, could paralyse it, force concessions, and ultimately enable the union to raise issues of industrial restructuring. It was for these reasons that the Fosatu unions adopted union unity as a central policy at its founding congress in 1979.
National auto union
The launch of Fosatu in 1979 strengthened organised workers and helped to draw the unorganised into its industrial affiliates. Also, the federation was better placed to take up non-factory issues at local and national levels. As a ‘tight’ federation, it provided common resources to affiliates and helped them build membership. Regional councils were set up to ensure cooperation; they and unions were frequently based in the same buildings. According to Fanaroff, ‘We used to share organisers. The Fosatu secretary in each region was the organiser of last resort. It was share and share alike, we shared photocopiers, benches, desks, cars, organising, strikes.’ Fosatu gave workers a concrete vision of unity in action, and was a model for future unity moves.
Chapter Twenty - New politics: 1987–1990
- Kally Forrest
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- Metal that Will not Bend
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- 27 November 2011, pp 416-443
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Numsa made decisive political shifts between 1987–1994. In these it was less a victimof external manipulations often beyond its control, and more of a pragmatic player confronting the question of what political goals it hoped to achieve and how to get there. Although consensus on a socialist society existed, interpretations on how to achieve this goal differed.
The banning of the UDF and imposition of the 1986 state of emergency moved Cosatu to the centre of the political stage. The Fosatu focus on strong organisation was vindicated as organised factories weathered attacks which township organisations could not withstand. There were moments in 1987 when the state appeared determined to destroy Cosatu – when it bombed Cosatu House where affiliate head offices were based (including Numsa) – but the labour movement was too extensive and too deeply entrenched to destroy. Sactu's fate was not going to be repeated.
The rapidly changing political landscape of the early 1990s, coupled with the scale of union growth, meant that Numsa could no longer control political developments in its ranks in the way that Mawu and Naawu had attempted. Without abandoning Mawu's socialist perspective, Numsa moved to shape the political landscape. It became more flexible in its relations with political movements, which meant a continuous assessment of how far it was prepared to compromise its independence. Its politics was still the subject of intense debate both internally and outside the union. In these interactions, the formulation of a working class political programme to guide its policies and activities was a constant refrain. The Mawu 1986 congress had called for such a blueprint – and it remained Numsa's task to fulfil it.
Freedom Charter: contested terrain
At Numsa's 1987 congress, former Macwusa unionists from the Eastern Cape tabled a motion calling for the adoption of the Freedom Charter, a topic which was also on the agenda of Cosatu's upcoming second congress. At issue was whether this historic popular document adequately articulated the union's socialist perspective.
Chapter Thirteen - The Cinderella sector: 1983–1990
- Kally Forrest
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- Book:
- Metal that Will not Bend
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 23 March 2018
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2011, pp 259-275
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Summary
The union had neglected that sector effectively. The big sectors of political plants in engineering and auto, they were pushing, they were making demands. The motor workers were an add-on. There were no resources allocated to them.’ Thus Tony Ehrenreich, a former national motor coordinator, remembers the motor sector before 1990, despite its 50 000 members making up a quarter of the union's membership. In that year, the union's central committee identified motor members as the most poorly organised, and as urgently needing attention
Background to motor sector
When the union belatedly turned its attention to overhauling the National Industrial Council for the Motor Industry (Nicmi) and revitalising the union's presence in the sector, it faced strong opposition from employers and established white unions. In 1993 the motor industry employed 179 000 employees in 17 691 mostly small firms, employing about 10 to 16 workers in urban areas and about five in rural areas. Many large component manufacturers, including Bosal, SKF, Smiths Industries, Dorbyl and Bosch, were accessible to organisation, but they were not typical. The retailers, such as the McCarthy Group, Saficon, Malbak, Imperial, Barlow Motor Holdings, and Combined Motor Holdings were the most powerful in the industry and employed about 120 000 workers.
Historically, Micwu had organised these workers. Its strongest membership was in Natal and the Western Cape, where it organised coloured and Indian artisans and clerical workers. Coloured workers dominated in the Western Cape because of the government's coloured labour preference policy and South Africa's Indian population lived primarily in Natal, where Micwu recruited Indian clerical workers. Numsa inherited this regional bias, together with a growing number of African unskilled garage workers, particularly in the Transvaal, who fell outside closed shop arrangements for established unions on the industrial council.
Nicmi covered workers of all races, although few Africans were artisans, and divided them for negotiating purposes into five ‘chapters’. Chapter one was for petrol station and repair shop workers, panel beaters and workers in spares outlets; chapter two for workers in vehicle body building; chapter three comprised workers in component manufacturing; chapter four was for workers in automotive engineering; and chapter five was for vehicle reconditioning.
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- Kally Forrest
-
- Book:
- Metal that Will not Bend
- Published by:
- Wits University Press
- Published online:
- 23 March 2018
- Print publication:
- 27 November 2011, pp 547-550
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- Chapter
- Export citation