Procesos pedagógicos de los juegos tradicionales

This thesis explores Numsa’s construction of power in the 1980s, but it is important to highlight certain organisational patterns that emerged in the 1970s as these small beginnings significantly contributed to its independent style. It will become clear in this overview that Numsa was a hybrid of different union traditions and that this would influence its ability to construct considerable power in the late 1980s. Its history is a complex web of organisations all of which emerged in the 1970s. For reasons of clarity this thesis will separate out these different strands and trace their respective paths as they slowly move towards each other to form one powerful organisation in 1987. The first thread to be considered is the Metal and Allied Workers Union (Mawu).

Mawu members recall the conditions under which they laboured before the coming of the unions in the 1970s. Their recollections illustrate the nature of the employers with which Mawu was confronted. A worker from a kitchenware factory, Prestige in Pietermaritzburg, remembers that it was mostly women who pressed metal objects into shape in what an employer described as a `very masculine type of environment`¹⁴⁷ owing to the strength needed to operate the presses. Besides the arduous nature of the work, it was repetitious, hot and noisy as presses continuously clanged while they tore through sheets of metal. No safety regulations were in place and no provision was made for earplugs, gloves, overalls, or fans to contend with the heat. The women started work at 7.30 am and ended at 10.30 pm, and in 1974 were earning R6.30 a week accompanied by an erratic payment of overtime. Dismissal without explanation was common, as was termination of employment on pregnancy. The least arduous jobs were reserved for whites and wage increases were allocated arbitrarily on `merit`. She recalls, “When the boss liked you, he gave you an increase. But when he did not like you, no matter how hard you worked he did not give you an increase.”¹⁴⁸

Alfred Qabula recalled his entry into Dunlop in 1974 where workers had to fill in forms with personal details, “In these papers there was a trick question: `If you are requested to work overtime will you agree or refuse?` You could say nothing but `yes` - if you said `no` you had no chance of

being employed at Dunlop.”¹⁴⁹ Levy Mamabolo recollects his work conditions before the appearance of the union, “In 1979 I took a job at Bosch in Brits. We had a lot of grievances.

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`.”¹⁵⁰ Samuel Mthethwa, a Dunlop worker, remembers, “That white man, he could do anything to you. If he felt like hitting you, he hit you. If he felt like being nice to you, he was nice to you. In those days any white man could give you instructions. This meant you had to be in three different places at the same time and you could be dismissed for failing.”¹⁵¹ Finally Mandlenkosi Makhoba describes conditions in a steel mill, Rely Precision Castings, on the East Rand,

A furnace is like a large oven powered by electricity. The heat from the mouth of the furnaces at Rely makes you weak. The white hot light is so bright that you cannot look into the furnace 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 furnacemen. But inside the Foundry they call you a cast-boy... Casting 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.

There is also danger if the furnace explodes. When the furnace is nearly empty and only the sand is left at the bottom it can explode. If it starts to explode it cracks. The metal will fly all over the room. You must rush to switch it off. If you are near you are going to burn.¹⁵²

For Mawu the 1970s was a struggle for survival. That it survived at all to grow in strength and numbers in the 1980s had much to do with the hard work, tenacity and survivalist strategies in which these early unionists engaged. In 1971 a University of Natal lecturer, David Hemson, together with activist white students from the National Union of South African Students (Wages Commission) and various registered unions in Tucsa, established the General Factory Workers Benefit Fund (GFWBF) in Durban. It administered death benefits for workers and provided a forum for them to discuss factory problems. In this way white intellectuals started to make regular contact with African workers. The explosion of strikes in 1973 led to an influx of members into the Benefit Fund, including into the Pietermaritzburg branch, where workers began to link up with

Durban membership. Pietermaritzburg members, who had a number of African Sactu organisers in their ranks, were soon demanding the launch of a metal union that would focus exclusively on their problems. Thus in April 1973, Mawu was formed and consisted of 200 workers 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 was comprised of two branches in Pietermaritzburg and

Durban.¹⁵³

The 1973 strikes were spontaneous, but the careful, strategic thinking and arduous work of these activists and intellectuals, was not. Fierce debate went into the formation of unions like Mawu, and what emerged were principles and strategies that would underpin these organisations in the future.

The Natal-based trade unionists had developed a strategic vision which had been sharpened by contact with coloured industrial unions in the Western and Eastern Cape. At the centre of their strategy was the perception that only an accumulation of worker power would enable meaningful change. Their experience of a racially divided South Africa, 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 the unions were open to all workers regardless of colour but in practice Africans constituted the mass membership although officials were composed of Africans, whites and Indians.¹⁵⁴ Central to their vision was the formation of industrial unions where a strong worker unity and identity would be forged. Workers in the metal industry would initially identify with the concentration of worker power in their factories, and then through the development of a working class consciousness, would progress to identify with metal workers across their industry. From here, metal workers could be united through a trade union federation and flex their power in tandem with workers from other sectors of the economy and, indeed, other parts of the globe. This approach was reinforced by observing the rise of local general unions, outside of their ranks, in the early 1970s. Such general unions provided a different model of trade unionism. Their focus was on a generalised worker solidarity and political identification, and not on the slow construction of power within industrial sectors. The Natal unionists observed that these general unions had difficulty in mobilising workers beyond their local communities thus excluding the possibility of building worker solidarity, and national power, in a sector of the economy with which workers identified. The South African Allied Workers Union (Saawu), for example, which also organised metalworkers, engaged in an overtly political unionism and organised through large meetings, and rallies, with little emphasis on focussed factory organisation. In this mass mobilisation, however, lay the seeds of its demise. Lacking any depth of organisation in the factories, the state moved to ban the union leadership and Saawu was badly weakened.¹⁵⁵

As a first step Mawu established an organisational presence in a factory and recruited membership.

It then developed an accountable leadership who ultimately became the shopstewards committee.

In reaction to Tucsa’s bureaucratic unionism, workers’ control underpinned these unionists’

approach to factory organisation. As Mawu, and later Numsa, organiser, Bernie Fanaroff recalls, Everything was workers’ control. That was the basis of the whole thing. Everything had to be discussed at a general meeting. The shopstewards would not take decisions without going back to a general meeting. We pushed hard that shopstewards must discuss things with their own department at lunchtime and then they must meet as a shopstewards 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.¹⁵⁶

The shopstewards committee chose representatives to sit on a Branch Executive Committee (BEC) together with shopstewards from other factories. In turn the BEC elected representatives to the National Executive Council (NEC) which consisted of factory leaders. National officials employed by the union or elected by workers attended these meetings in a non-voting capacity.

Careful mandating and report-backs at all levels ensured regular communication and accountability between general membership and union officials.

In the same year that Mawu was formed, the National Union of Textile Workers (NUTW) and the Trade Union Advisory Co-ordinating Committee (Tuacc) emerged from the GFWBF. In 1974 they were joined by the Chemical Workers Industrial Union (CWIU) and the Transport and General Workers Union when they united under the banner of Tuacc. The latter was committed to building non-racial industrial unions based on strong, democratic factory floor organisation through shop steward representation. It was mandated to co-ordinate the activities, finances, and administration of the four unions, and to formulate policies that would reflect their structures and practices. It also provided for the sharing of resources including that of education. It was to be an important precursor and model in the formation of the later Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu) and operated until its founding in 1979.¹⁵⁷

The role of white intellectuals was contentious. Lowry for example recalls the `overwhelming presence of white intellectuals` in Tuacc and the Council of Industrial Workers of the

Witwatersrand’s (CIWW -a Transvaal co-ordinating structure) delegations.¹⁵⁸ Nevertheless they played an important role in the early days where they shared their skills, knowledge, information and resources which the apartheid regime had bequeathed them but had denied their fellow black unionists. Some became trade unionists and others offered skills in areas of law, administration, the economy, politics, and financial matters, often on a voluntary basis. In addition they played an educative role within Tuacc recognising that workers’ education was critical to the emerging¹⁵⁹ unions’ strategy of building shopsteward leadership in the factories.¹⁶⁰ Buhlungu has pointed out however that the white intellectuals are often solely credited with the creation of a democratic tradition within these unions whereas he believes it was a product of a dynamic interaction between the lived experiences of black workers, and the contribution of community, party (SACP,

ANC, Sactu), grassroots and university educated intellectuals.¹⁶¹

At the broadest political level both the black Sactu activists and white intellectuals were committed to establishing a non-racial, democratic South Africa. Many of the white intellectuals, however, arrived at this position from a different angle, “We had a totally different tradition: we didn’t mind using any structures provided we could maintain our independence. Workers’ independence was everything that Western Marxism taught us.”¹⁶² commented Mike Morris a white intellectual and union activist in the seventies. White intellectuals tended to subscribe to a European tradition of union organisation and socialist politics rather than to the South African tradition of national liberation, and anti-apartheid politics associated with the ANC and Sactu. They were well-informed on South African labour history but were too young to have been part of it, and this, combined with their politics, influenced them to come to questions of liberation with an

independent approach to strategy and tactics. The European Marxist and socialist ideologies they embraced¹⁶³ taught them that raising workers’ consciousness was the route to changing power relations in the society and their strong tactical sense led them to appreciate that in order to build worker power for socialism, it was necessary to offer workers real benefits. Organising workers into trade unions was an ideal vehicle for this. They aimed to improve workers` wages and conditions but they also aimed to fundamentally change the South African political system.¹⁶⁴

Such politics was contested however and in this was born the seeds of the `populist\workerist`

debate. According to Mawu organiser Moses Mayeksio,

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. There were discussions from the beginning. That’s what divided the leadership into so-called `workerists` and

`populists` camps. They were based on interpretations of the final goal.¹⁶⁵

The dominant Marxist politics, or workerist tendency, repudiated the national democratic struggle as expressed by the ANC in favour of a democratic socialist resolution. The `populist` grouping favoured links with the national liberation movement whose primary aim was to destroy the apartheid state. At times political differences were acerbic but the state strengthened the hand of the `workerist` group through the banning of two Mawu `populist` organisers, Sipho Khubeka and Gavin Anderson in 1976. Yet despite such differences, much agreement existed on the tactics to be employed in the unionisation process. As IAS (Industrial Aid Society) activist and early Mawu organiser, Khubeka recalls,

You had two groups who did not see eye to eye politically. There were the students and lecturers who felt sidelined 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... I must say the comrades did a lot of good work under the circumstances. By drawing a line between labour and politics, for a period the state did not closely watch and interfere with those people... The state saw the ANC as the

main enemy. That period gave comrades time to build very strong structures which were later instrumental in creating the period which we have today.¹⁶⁶

Mawu’s development in the 1970s was characterised by a process of growth and collapse in all its factories. In the absence of the right to bargain with management it struggled to offer benefits to its members in the form of improved working conditions or wages. Following the 1973 mass strikes Mawu’s membership grew rapidly in Natal until by June 1974 it possessed a signed-up

membership of 3 883 workers in at least 68 factories Membership however dwindled and unionists came to understand that high membership numbers were not a substitute for strong factory

organisation. Mawu had moved from factory to factory without consolidating in any of them.

Employers too had recovered from the shock of the 1973 strikes and were actively promoting liaison committees. Coupled with these structural weaknesses went the banning of a number of trade unionists in 1974 (including Mawu’s Pietermaritzburg organiser Jeanette Cunningham-Brown). In consequence a new organisational strategy was advanced and was gradually implemented. It involved the consolidation of organisation in a limited number of factories.

Shopstewards would be allocated a central role and would be directly accountable to members.

They would organise workers in their departments and represent them to management. They would also represent members on Mawu’s Branch Executive Committee (BEC). Furthermore the opening of local union offices would facilitate greater participation of members in union affairs.¹⁶⁷

In the Transvaal, in Johannesburg, another struggle for union rebirth was taking place but unlike Natal there was no wave of strikes to assist with the recruitment of workers. Organisers from the IAS, holding similar aims to the GFWBF, were slowly recruiting and building worker communities in factories. Like the GFWBF, the IAS was founded by a combination of African Sactu activists and white intellectuals, mainly university lecturers and Nusas students who had been isolated politically by the BC movement but were keen to make a political contribution. From early on they made the tactical decision to recruit workers in the metal and engineering sectors owing to their centrality in the South African economy.¹⁶⁸

Worker members of the IAS attended classes run by University of the Witwatersrand lecturers on Saturdays and they explored the experiences of the ICU in the 1920s, and of Sactu in the 1950s.¹⁶⁹ They evaluated the ICU and its effectiveness and failings, and through discussion drew lessons for the current labour movement. To these university intellectuals, the failure of the ICU was

organisational. It failed to win recognised trade union status for Africans as 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 withstand government repression. The lessons for workers in the seventies was that they needed to organise themselves into tight industrial trade unions which through worker power

would force the status quo to recognise African unions. Sactu’s approach differed from the ICU’s

would force the status quo to recognise African unions. Sactu’s approach differed from the ICU’s