“African men stood up and told the employers that we want those Coloured women back”

In the 1960s our union was the hardest hit of all the unions because all our organizers, all our secretaries and all our presidents were banned. At the time almost all our people were banned from top to bottom because they said that our union was a red union, we were influenced by the communists, just because we won't hide anything from the workers, just because we discussed any law that affected the workers in our meetings. Of course, the employers didn't like it and the government said we are a union that is near to the Communist people.

After I was banned Freda Petersen, an executive member, took over but she was very nervous and she cracked when she heard that the Security Branch were there. Then they got Johnny Mentoor, the vice president, to take over. He kept it going but the original unity was no longer there.

After my banning order I was not as involved as before. When Jan Theron became general secretary in the mid 1970s they brought him to see me and we discussed union matters. Jan, his wife Althea and Virginia Engel worked together in Cape Town. Quite a few years after my banning order was lifted the comrades asked me to come back to work in Cape Town again to sort out things because there were not enough people there. Jan had never worked in the factory, although he had experience about the union, so they asked me to come back to assist the union, to assist Jan.

I agreed, but at first I was very nervous because I didn't want to be banned again. I refused to go back to the head office, because I was still being watched. I was scared that they would ban me again, because it had been so difficult. They hired a small office just above the head office so that they could come to me. I assisted them because all the organizers had just joined the union and whenever they wanted to, they came over to my office. I worked liked that until the time of the Fattis and Monis strike. I was still working under cover but I had to come out in the open when the strike broke out.

Strike at Fattis & Monis

The strike at Fattis & Monis in Bellville lasted for seven months in 1979. The day the strike started Jan Theron, was busy in George and Oscar Mpetha, the Secretary-General of the African Food and Canning Workers Union, was busy organising in East London. I was alone at the head office and had to handle the strike with an organiser from Cape Town, Virginia Engel. I was with the workers at the meeting the night when they decided that they're going to strike tomorrow because five Coloured women were dismissed. We met the employers and they refused to reinstate the Coloured women. They had fired five coloureds and the whole factory, Africans and coloureds, came out on strike ¹⁵.

When the strike broke out I rushed to the factory and had to get the workers to the office quickly because the police vans were there to arrest them. The men stood up, African men stood up and told the employers that ‘we want those Coloured women back. If you don't want to take those women back, we are not going to work'. So the unity among the workers was quite good. They didn't say, ‘Oh that is a Coloured, we are not going to stand with a Coloured', or ‘That is an African, we are not going to stand with an African'. The workers would only go back to work on the condition that everybody was allowed back. The bosses were not prepared to do that, and the negotiations continued. The negotiations broke down, and then it started again.

We had meetings in Bellville every day. We did not have a place to meet because the employers and the authorities co-operated and phoned different venues and told them not to give the venue to us for meetings. The manager of the bioscope in Bellville was very helpful and gave us some rooms and we had meetings with the workers nearly every day to inform them of the progress with the employers and to keep them together otherwise they became scabs. The workers stayed strong for a long time, but then the children of some of the workers fell ill and one child died. That broke their morale a little bit. We could not afford to pay their full wages but could only give them a little money every week to see them through. In that way we lost some of the people, but they still stayed together. Some organisations also gave food parcels but it was very hard for workers to stay in the strike.

It was not easy to keep people together for seven months. The workers were from different areas such as Stellenbosch, the Valley (Paarl) and the surrounding small towns, and w herever workers lived we had a small group who kept in contact to keep the people on the ground informed. It is of no use for the middle layer to know everything and on the ground they know nothing. That is the basis from which everything else must grow. Sometimes the morale was high but sometimes it was low. So, we always took people from different trade unions with us when we went to speak to workers so they could see that they were not alone in their struggle.

When we reported back about what the employers had said they would see there is still hope because there were still things to be done. We always tried to keep them in high spirits and there was never a major break away from the strike. We had a committee that dealt with all types of problems and if we were not in a position to solve the problem, we approached other organisations for assistance. There was also a committee that raised the funds to help people pay their rent to prevent them from being evicted from their homes.

Jack Tarshish, the owner of a shirt factory in Cape Town gave us a lot of support. We had stickers to explain the strike that we were selling in the community. We had other fundraising efforts with which we could pay the strikers a little something. We could never say that we would give them R50 or R60, because as we raised money we paid it out so that we could give something to everybody. They could really see that the union was trying to help them. We encouraged them and told them that they were not alone, and that we should continue, because if we lost they were going to be in a weaker position. They really appreciated the fact that other trade unions and people from communities came together to support them.

During that seven-month period the Africans had to go on their annual holiday, to their families at home. The lawyers advised us not to let them go home because it was going to infringe on the strike. So we spoke to them, explained to them and asked if they were prepared to stay to see how far we got with the strike. We had a lot of support from different organisations and foreign countries. The company even had to change the names of some of their products to send it overseas.

The pressure became too much for the bosses, so they called us to negotiate in order to try to settle. After the strike all the people were reinstated and the Africans went home on holiday. They got leave for that period, and the company also provided transport, food and other things for them to take home to their families.

Rebuilding the Paarl Branch

I assisted the other organizers with negotiating at Fattis and Monis for four months. Then there were problems with our branch in Paarl and they appealed to head office to release me to assist them. I was elected as branch secretary in Paarl and worked there until 1985.

Dienie Hartogh, who worked for the union, had made a statement saying that she did not believe that it was right for Africans to be chosen above coloureds. There was a lot of unhappiness amongst the union members in our camp because we were against Apartheid, and what she was asking for now is Apartheid. We had meetings and decided to call her in to ask why she made such a statement. She denied it. The executive were unhappy because they felt that it was a sensitive matter. She worked for the union for a long time and had a clique that supported her.

When she was dismissed, she was very unhappy and formed a breakaway union. As a trade unionist, you must act on behalf of the workers, and she had an attitude so the members felt that they wanted to give her another chance. We discussed it with the executive and Oscar and I went to speak to the old members because we felt the branch was not going to function well anymore because she divided the branch in two. We used to have one chairman, one secretary and one treasurer for the whole of Paarl. But she divided the branch to such an extent that the one branch now had two chairmen, two secretaries and two of everything else, which broke the branch. We solved the problem and managed to get the branch together again.

While I was working in Paarl I also assisted head office officials to organize other branches. We went to organize workers in the dried fruit factory in Upington for the first time and stayed there a week. On the way back we had a tyre burst, the car rolled and I ended up in a vineyard next to the road. I was in intensive care and very badly injured - I had four broken ribs, a broken leg and an injured arm. I spent 14 days in Malmesbury Hospital. After that I worked another two years but the injuries were getting to me. Then I retired from the union in 1985.