CHAPTER 12: Into the union

CHAPTER 12

Into the union

BY THE BEGINNING OF 1979, NEIL HAD, IN SIPHO’S WORDS, BEEN more or less ‘elbowed out’ of any meaningful work in the IAS. He was also feeling low about his messed-up relationship with Liz. He decided to take a break from the city by working as a locum in the Transkei. Perhaps this was when Dave Dison drove him down to Umtata. From here a friend of Neil’s, Dr Mtshembla, took him up to Mount Fletcher, where Neil stood in for a doctor who was having an operation. In this remote mountainous area, many families had missing members, forced by circumstance into being migrant workers. For about six weeks, Neil took over the running of a private practice in town, as well as acting as superintendent at the small Taylor Bequest Hospital and visiting rural clinics in the afternoons. With his hopes of getting ‘into the union’ looking so slim, was he taking stock? Did he, I wonder, consider reverting to full-time medicine? Despite his capacity to isolate himself, which Liz believed to be a trait deep within him, after the intensity of Johannesburg and the closeness of comrades like Gavin and Sipho, who engaged so passionately in the struggle, perhaps he was also considering whether he could ever re-embrace the isolation of life as a rural doctor.

Neil returned after his six weeks, back to weekend shifts at Baragwanath and volunteering at the IAS. By now, Liz and Annie had moved from Gavin and Nici’s to 451 Fox Street in Jeppestown, a white working-class area from where you could see straight down to the city’s skyscrapers. Unlike in nearby Bertrams, there were patches of garden and trees here. The house had high ceilings and large rooms, and they were able to accommodate Eddie Wes after he had given up Peacock Cottage and been abroad for a few months. A curtain separated Eddie’s room from Liz’s. The small, intertwining, white left community shifted constantly into new combinations. Eddie Wes believes that an element of their experimentation was that they had very few role models on the left, so many people having disappeared in the 1960s, into prison or overseas or into silence. He recalled his own dad, a Lithuanian Jewish socialist, burning some of his books in those days out of fear, although there was one that he could not bring himself to destroy. It was a copy of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, inside which was Lenin’s Imperialism. Eddie showed it to Neil. ‘Nobody could tell us what was right’, says Eddie. ‘Once you realised everything was crazy, everything went.’

In this period, when Neil was still trying to get ‘into the unions’, there was time for long discussions. Eddie enjoyed Neil’s meditative style of conversation and his ‘ability to get into other people’s space, to understand the parameters of where they were working from’. Many on the left pushed their position emotively, but Neil’s manner was to listen and build on what his interlocutor said, exploring and trying to understand people ‘and how they sat within a political context … it wasn’t an imposing kind of politics. It was a revealing kind of politics.’ While Camus and Nietzsche might occasionally come into the conversation, to Eddie, Neil was ‘a fundamental Marxist’ rather than the kind of communist who would be accepting of down-the-line party doctrine. His influence, Eddie felt, was all the more powerful.

With two older sisters giving him some insight into feminist ideas on discourse, Eddie also noted how women especially related to this soft, sensitive listening. Occupying the other half of the house to which Annie and Liz had moved was Jane Bailie, a single parent of two small boys who was studying for her BA. As a frequent visitor to the house, Neil established a friendship with the family that was to continue after her marriage to David Rosenthal and their move to Crown Mines. While most of Neil’s friendships were essentially political, Jane consciously avoided knowing too much. While trying to break out of her conditioning and learn from those more politically involved, she understood the dangers and was honest about her limits. On one occasion, however, hearing someone knocking next door and seeing a military policeman, Jane went to speak to him. He was looking for Neil. She told him that Neil didn’t live there. ‘That was probably the most useful thing that I did.’

Jane was aware that lack of involvement made her and David ‘political nonentities’ for some people, although not for Neil, who knew that she was basically sympathetic, and seemed to enjoy simply coming over to relax:

You know people were in and out of each other’s houses all the time … He’d come over to our side of the house to have a cup of tea or something, but he was very good to my kids. This is perhaps an aspect of Neil that other people wouldn’t have noticed because none of them had kids. He used to take them out into the road and play soccer and he lent Brendan his microscope, his proper microscope, an incredibly generous thing to do. He also lent him a bag of bones!

As an observer, Jane was aware of an ‘element of competition’ among those who were ‘involved’. But this was absent in Neil, and she didn’t feel Neil judging her. Instead, he introduced her to political ideas and books, such as a biography of Tito, the non-aligned communist leader of Yugoslavia, explaining things ‘in a totally unpatronising way’.

Neil also shared an interest in philosophy with David Rosenthal, who was impressed by how Neil would listen quietly to his interpretations of the liberal philosopher Karl Popper. They were both impressed, too, at Neil’s capacity to get on with Jane’s very conservative father, and how Neil was quite willing to talk and find points of contact with him. He never, however, spoke about his own father.

While Neil’s visits to his sister Jill and her husband Paul in Pretoria were sporadic, his enjoyment of their children was evident. A letter to his father in February 1979, the first Neil had written since their rift seven years previously, suggests he had spent an evening with the family in Pretoria at the same time as his mother had been there: ‘It was good to see her again after so long …’ Although the letter began with thanks for money sent at Christmas, used to repair his motorbike, the main purpose of the letter appears to have been to repair an element of ‘human friendship’ between father and son, whatever their differences:

Despite all that has happened between us I do not feel any enmity as long as we realize that we have differences and we cannot impose our view of things on the other person. We are both adults with the right to choose for ourselves what we want and I don’t feel that that should stand between the relationship a father should have with his son. We have both done stupid things in the past but I think that time has healed those wounds to a certain extent, although there will always be differences between us. We are living in troubled times and I think we must realize that human friendship must stand above any petty differences we have with people.

Neil ends by saying that he has heard his father had given up smoking, and hopes that he is well and active: ‘I hope to see you in the coming months. Yours faithfully, Neil.’ This reaching out towards a deeply authoritarian father to put their relationship on a new footing suggests a personal maturation. The calmness that Neil could now show to his father was an essential asset for a union organiser.

* * *

On 21 April, Oscar Mpetha arrived in Johannesburg to assist the recently established Food and Canning branch office. The two organisers who had been appointed were out of their depth and floundering. Seventy-year-old Oscar had decided to take on the task.

Neil was delighted to have Baba – ‘Father’ – Mpetha come to stay with him for several weeks. Sipho recalls the first time he saw Oscar in Neil’s house. He didn’t know who he was and Neil made no introduction, leaving Sipho curious about the ‘old African man … walking up and down in the room. He had a book of Marx … moving up and down, reading.’ Later, when Sipho asked Neil who it was, Neil told him. Neil was not one to show off, although Baba Mpetha was regarded as something of a father figure of ‘the movement’ by young members of the white left, who revered the commitment of a man reputed to be always willing to go to jail, indeed to have his toothbrush ready in his pocket.1 Even someone on the fringes, like Jane Rosenthal, was pleased when Neil asked if she could lend him a blanket for his guest.

Oscar would get up early in the morning and read Capital and other Marxist texts that Neil kept in the house before setting off for work. Meeting Neil’s friends, including Gavin, Oscar would ask searching questions and listen very attentively to the replies. In retrospect, it was apparent that, beyond his immediate tasks, he was assessing Neil and his milieu as part of a bigger plan.

Oscar’s organising strategy was to go to factories where the union had once been strong. His diary-cum-report to head office briefly notes his visits to factories and meetings, sparsely interspersed with comments on occasional successes and, more often, obstacles:

MONDAY 23 April 1979

Visited I & J. George Goch got into difficulties and contacted two workers made arrangements to meet them at their homes in Shawel [Soweto] on Saturday afternoon. This meeting did not materialise. After roaming the streets of Soweto we found these young chaps but they pretended never to have seen us.

TUESDAY 24 April visited H. Jones & Co for lunch hour meeting.

THURSDAY 26 April visited LKB for a lunch hour meetings.

At both these meetings I emphasized the necessity of a strong executive. I pointed out that constitutionally the majority of both factories members were not in compliance with the constitution.

FRIDAY 27 April Collected subs at H. Jones.

SATURDAY 28th April visited the homes of I & J members at Shawel Sowetho [sic] with very bad results.2

Oscar’s reputation in the Cape didn’t count for much among Transvaal workers, who must have challenged him with questions like, ‘What has your union done for us?’ Back at head office, Jan Theron was aware of Neil assisting when he could, driving Oscar to factories. During the six weeks, a bond developed between the two, along with a mentoring relationship of teacher and student.

Neil also had the opportunity to learn about Food and Canning’s history from one of its principal actors. From its beginnings in 1941, it had set out as a non-racial union to represent workers of all backgrounds in the food industries until forced by legislation to split into a registered union for Coloureds and an unregistered union for Africans. Nevertheless, Food and Canning continued to believe that workers were best served by a single non-racial union open to all, and, in spite of their formal separation, the two unions had tried to operate as far as possible as one. Severely weakened by bannings, imprisonment and exile of key personnel, the union had just about survived. It was only since the appointments of Jan Theron and Oscar Mpetha, in a changing economic and political climate, that it was beginning to revive.

Through accompanying Oscar, Neil glimpsed something of the arduous practicalities of union work. In mid-May, after a couple of weeks of slogging away at collecting subs and getting new committees properly elected at two or three factories, Oscar was able to report a small victory over a dismissal:

MONDAY 14 May – Visited Renown where we received a good reception from some workers we contacted, but they were not prepared to take the initiative.

TUESDAY 15 May – Attended a meeting after which we met the management re employee that was dismissed. We came to an agreement with the factory forman [sic], who promised to see the assistant manager there and then. But after we left the Committee was told that the factory assistant manager refused to re-instate the worker.

THURSDAY 24 May – We met the assistant manager. After a long argument he re-instated that worker and undertook to rectify.

Meanwhile, as Oscar was struggling to gain a credible foothold for the Johannesburg branch, in Cape Town the dismissal of five Coloured workers at a milling factory of Fatti’s & Moni’s in Bellville unexpectedly began escalating into events that would not only make trade union history but illustrate the impossibility of isolating an economic struggle from a political one. With Oscar getting news direct from Cape Town, Neil was well placed to hear the inside story.

The union’s strategy in the Cape, as now in Johannesburg, was to return to the factories where it had once been prominent. One of these was Fatti’s & Moni’s, a family-owned company that milled wheat for the United Macaroni group. In 1978, both Coloured and African workers within the milling section had asked Food and Canning to take up their complaints. Refusing to recognise the African Food and Canning Workers’ Union, the company had ignored the union’s letters. Then, in March 1979, Coloured and African workers signed a joint petition authorising the union to negotiate on their behalf an increase of the basic wage to R40 a week, instead of the current R17 for women and R19 for men. It was this petition that was to trigger the sackings.3

When no reply arrived by 12 April, the union wrote to the Minister of Labour, asking him to appoint a Conciliation Board. Although the board only dealt with Coloured workers, this action would at least force Fatti’s & Moni’s management to meet the union. Instead, Mr Terblanche, the milling manager, assembled the workers and told them that before the end of the day they must choose between the union and a liaison committee that he had recently started with his own appointees. Choose the union, warned Terblanche, and there would be ‘moelike tye’ (difficult times). Refusing to go along with the manager, the milling workers rang the union. On 23 April, five active Coloured supporters of the union were dismissed, with no reasons given. Two of the five had organised the signing of the petition. The following day, when the workers demanded to know the reasons, five more Coloured workers were dismissed. On 25 April, all the workers, Coloured and African, asked to see the manager. The intransigent Terblanche refused to discuss anything, calling the Department of Labour instead. Both Terblanche and the department officials now attempted to separate the Coloured and African workers. When they refused to budge, they were all told to get out and collect their pay on Friday. Eighty-eight in all had by now been dismissed.

Fatti’s & Moni’s had poured oil on a fire. The workers refused to go and collect their pay because at that point they would be officially signed off. The timing was fortuitous, however, as the long-awaited report of the Wiehahn Commission was published on 1 May, only a week after the dismissals. What might have passed off as business as usual now drew unusual press interest, especially this unexpected solidarity between Coloured and African workers in defiance of apartheid divisions. A mass meeting of students called for a boycott of Fatti’s & Moni’s products. A wide range of organisations and individuals soon backed the move. Although initially only in force in the western Cape, the boycott meant that communities were being mobilised.

Up in Johannesburg, Oscar tried to make contact with Fatti’s & Moni’s workers in Isando, but faced obstacles. Workers were not allowed out of the gate at lunch hour. He managed to make contact after work, and, having set up a Sunday meeting in Tembisa, simply wrote: ‘This meeting was not successful.’ With 88 workers dismissed in Cape Town and the company refusing to talk to the union, the reaction was not surprising. But Oscar was persistent. Before leaving Johannesburg early in June, he helped to draft a leaflet in isiZulu and Sesotho for another meeting with Fatti’s & Moni’s workers, to be held later in the month, hoping the union would send him to help organise and attend.

Ever the strategist, Oscar returned to Cape Town with a further plan. He concluded his report on the Transvaal situation with recommendations of the order in which factories should be organised, and then a final paragraph:

With a sub head-office in Johannesburg. I further suggest that I be permitted to go back to Transvaal immediately to organise more factories and bring Transvaal to its potential so as to employ another person more responsible than the two organisers. They lack initiative and responsibility and also the experience to do such mighty work.

This ‘another person’ was Neil. Before leaving for Cape Town, Oscar had already asked him if he would be prepared to work for the union. While Neil had said that he would, he knew that the offer would have to be confirmed by head office. Jan still had to be persuaded that Neil had become more grounded and could be trusted. To be a union organiser meant that all activity had to be above board and openly accountable to the workers. Did Oscar mention Neil’s banned comrades, Gavin and Sipho? Surely not. Yet he knew that through their links Neil would have access to Tembisa, the residential area for the workers whom Food and Canning hoped to organise. Perhaps Oscar simply told Jan that Neil had developed useful contacts through his IAS work, and that he had his feet well on the ground. Furthermore, Neil was so committed that he was prepared to work without pay. How many candidates would apply on those terms? Jan had one final practical reservation. Neil had not yet done his army service and was liable to be called up at any time. Oscar must have said that they would face that when the problem arose. In the meantime this committed, unassuming young man was the right person. With Oscar’s recommendation, Jan offered Neil the job.

Oscar’s return to Cape Town coincided with the boycott receiving a boost from an unexpected quarter. The Western Province African Chamber of Commerce had decided to support the dismissed workers, with African traders now refusing to stock bread from the Good Hope bakery, a subsidiary of Fatti’s & Moni’s. Sales began to be seriously affected, and the company’s share price fell. It seemed to be a turning point.

Suddenly the management wanted to talk – not with the workers but with the African traders and businessmen. The latter agreed to meet, on condition that the union was present. Meetings took place at the Bellville Holiday Inn, at the company’s expense. However, it was soon clear that Fatti’s & Moni’s still felt that it could hold out against the union’s main demands; as the African workers’ contract periods expired, they would be arrested for not holding valid passes and sent back to the Ciskei. It was a vivid illustration that the union struggle was not purely economic, but inextricably political.

As weeks turned to months, the union faced the problem of keeping up worker morale and resistance. There were police raids and some arrests. Thanks to a donation from abroad, Food and Canning was managing to give each striker R15 a week, but insisted that the workers meet daily for a roll call, discussion and songs, with deductions being made for absence or drunkenness. Community support and press coverage around the boycott helped to keep spirits up, giving hope that the management might be forced to negotiate seriously. To the union, the outcome was far from certain.

Then, in the middle of July, the death of the three-month-old daughter of a striker who could not afford a doctor catapulted the campaign to national attention. The Moni family had originally come from Italy to set up a tiny grocery shop in the gold-rush town of Johannesburg, and the company’s products, from pasta to ice-cream cones, were meant to conjure up happy family settings. The Catholic Students’ Society at the University of the Witwatersrand issued a leaflet headed ‘WHAT CAN WE DO? FATTIS AND MONIS STRIKE’:

On the 14th of July, one of the workers lost his 3 month old daughter. He had delayed sending her to the doctor because he had so little money and refused to go to the factory to collect his pay. To collect pay would mean workers were no longer on Fattis and Monis books and that their passes would be endorsed, and they would be sent back to the homeland and face slow starvation.4

The leaflet went on to ask ‘Why must we, as Christians, respond?’, with the answer quoting liberally from the proceedings of the Second Vatican Council. The Moni family could not have been happy, especially fearing the spread of the boycott of Fatti’s & Moni’s products overseas.

Oscar returned to Johannesburg, this time with Jan, to discuss both widening the boycott and to offer Neil the job of organiser of the African Food and Canning Workers’ Transvaal branch. Neil was elated. He resigned from the IAS, handing over his workman’s compensation cases to three other doctors: Liz Floyd, Liz Thomson and Jenny Cunningham. At last, he was ‘in the unions’.

1 Barbara Hogan, interview 20.7.95.

2 Oscar Mpetha, General Organizer’s Report, circa June 1979, Food & Canning Workers’ Union (FCWU) Archive, University of Cape Town Libraries, Manuscripts and Archives, BC721.

3 Jan Theron, ‘A Chronology of the Fattis & Monis Dispute’ 10.8.79. Subsequent details are drawn from this report by the General Secretary, FCWU Archive.

4 Catholic Students’ Society, University of the Witwatersrand, circa July 1979, FCWU Archive.