This March, as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Durban strike, we reflect on the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa’s) deep roots that lie in the Durban strike. We take this moment to reflect on the general strike by industrial and other workers that began on January 9, 1973.
The year before there was a strike by dockworkers in Durban, and a new militancy emerged after the ban on the freedom movement, and communists, in 1960. When the strike ended at the end of March 1973, close to 100 000 mainly African workers went on strike.
Following the dock workers’ strike of 1972, the General Factory Workers’ Benefit Fund was formed in Durban in 1972 by the radical academic, Richard Turner, trade unionist Harriet Bolton and some of Turner’s students. Turner was committed to the idea of workers’ control. At the time it was illegal for black workers to belong to a registered union, so black workers joined a benefit fund as a cover for union activities. After the Durban strike, thousands of workers joined the benefit fund.
A number of trade unions were formed after the 1973 strike, including the Metal and Allied Workers Union (Mawu), which was founded in Pietermaritzburg in April 1974. It was formed from an allowance fund with 200 members from two factories, Alcon and Scotland. Cable. Alpheus Mthethwa was elected branch secretary. The Transvaal branch was formed in 1975.
Academic Kally Forrest has written that: “The fierce debate became the formation of unions like Mawu, and the principles and strategies that emerged to support these unions in the future. The essence of these strategies is that only the accumulation of workers’ power can bring meaningful change.
“The murder of Richard Turner in 1978 shows that the system of racial capitalism sees the power of workers to control workers as a serious threat to its existence.”
Mawu was accepted into the International Federation of Metalworkers. In South Africa it works closely with the National Union of Motor and Rubber Workers of South Africa and the Automotive, Rubber and Allied Workers Union. In 1979 he and other unions formed the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu).
Fosatu is a trade union that remains independent from the national liberation movement. Fosatu developed an impressive program of workers’ culture, including poetry and theatre, and was known for its commitment to democratic practices on the shop floor and a deep commitment to workers’ control.
Mawu gained access to the Dunlop factory in Durban in 1983. Workers began raising money for a strike fund and then moved slowly and refused to work overtime. Some workers were fired. There was a big strike in 1984 when the workers used the sialala la strategy – sleep at work at night.
In his autobiography A Working Life: Cruel Beyond Belief, Temba Qabula, who is also a well-known poet and playwright, wrote: “We refuse to leave because the factory is ours. We built it with sweat and blood. We lost all our energy for this company and it is ours”.
After the attack on Dunlop there were also attacks on Bakers Bread and Clover.
At Praise Poem for Fosatufirst performed in 1984, Qabula, wrote:
You are the metal locomotive moving above
Of other metals
Unbent metal sent to
Engineers but they can not bend it.
Teach us Fosatu about the organization’s past
Before we came.
Tell us about the mistakes so we don’t
That’s the mistake.
Our hope rests in you, Sambane who digs
Holes and sleep in them, while others dig
Hole and leave them.
I say this because you teach workers to understand
What is his job in his organization,
And what is he in society
Lead us Fosatu to where we really want to be.
There was another strike in 1985, including stoppages to demand the release of Moses Mayekiso, who had been elected as a Mawu shop steward in 1979 and imprisoned in late 1984. He had also been involved in community-based resistance linked to United Democratic. Front (UDF), which was launched in 1983, and the trade union grew with the struggle of the people.
In 1985, Mawu led a major strike at Sarmcol, a subsidiary of the British Tire and Rubber Company, in Mpophomeni, not far from Pietermaritzburg. Almost a thousand workers were fired. Four shop committee members were abducted while they were in a meeting at the house of Phineas Sibiya, a famous Mawu shop attendant. Three of them were killed, one survived from a gunshot wound. As the strike developed, the union came under serious pressure from Inkatha, a largely reactionary and pro-apartheid ethnic nationalist organization.
Also in 1985, Mawu members in Mpophomeni made a play, Long March, which tells of his struggle against Sarmcol. It’s world travel. When the workers called for a boycott of all white-owned shops in Natal (as the province was named), they came under intense pressure from Inkatha.
In the same year, 1985, Mawu was transferred to the new ANC Congress of the South African Trade Union (Cosatu), which was launched on 1 December 1985 with Jay Naidoo elected as its first general secretary. About a third of the 460 000 workers who make up Cosatu come from Fosatu, including powerful labor leaders such as Chris Dlamini, John Gomomo and Ronald Mofokeng.
In May 1986, Mayekiso was elected Mawu’s general secretary. A month later he was arrested and detained on charges of treason.
Qabula wrote that Cosatu held “sleeping seminars” to educate workers about workplace and community issues and to build a fighting federation that took up issues on the shop floor and the struggle for national liberation.
On May Day 1986, Inkatha launched its own trade union, the Union of South African Workers, carrying a coffin that symbolized the death of Cosatu. In Natal there were several attacks on Cosatu members by Inkatha. On June 6, 11 workers were killed when a strike at the Hlobane mine was attacked. But Cosatu became stronger as the struggle against apartheid intensified.
In 1987, at the height of the urban uprising and the brutal repression imposed during the state of emergency, Mawu joined three other unions to form Numsa. The unions are the Amalgamated Motor Industry Trade Union, the National Automotive and Allied Trade Union and the Metal, Mining and Allied Trade Union of South Africa. Two Cosatu unions have also recently joined Numsa, namely the General and Allied Workers Union and the Transport and General Workers Union. Mayekiso was elected as the new general secretary of the union while still in custody. He was finally released in April 1989.
The new union remained fiercely loyal to the principle of workers’ control, and continued to face severe repression. In May 1989, Jabu Ndlovu, a Numsa shopkeeper who had previously been a powerful Mawu shopkeeper, was attacked and killed by Inkatha at his home in Pietermaritzburg. He, his wife Jabulani, also a member of Numsa, and their daughter were shot and burned.
When the ANC was unbanned in 1990, Cosatu was openly affiliated with the ANC, as part of a so-called tripartite alliance comprising the ANC, Cosatu and the South African Communist Party (SACP). Numsa offered critical solidarity with the national liberation movement but took a clear position against the shift to neoliberal policies, beginning with the adoption in 1996 of a self-imposed structural adjustment program known as the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution plan.
But as the ANC’s betrayal grew more violent, Numsa’s voice grew louder. In November 2014 Numsa was expelled from Cosatu.
After the democratically adopted resolution, the trade unions went on to form a new federation – the Federation of South African Trade Unions – an organization that connects the struggle of trade unions and communities – the United Front and a political instrument for the working class – the Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party.
Today Numsa is the largest trade union in South Africa, with over 300 000 members. It remains committed to the hard fight on the shop floor and has been joined by more and more workers from outside the historical base of the trade union among metal workers. Workers in a wide range of fields – from university cleaners to airline cabin crew – have joined unions, and unions have steadily won benefits for their members. It also remains a revolutionary socialist union committed to building unity among progressive organizations of the working class, as well as Pan-African and international solidarity.
Irvin Jim is the secretary general of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect official policy or position Mail & Guardians.