S. African Police Rout GM Strikers

Police used dogs and whips to disperse strikers outside the General Motors Corp. auto assembly plant in Port Elizabeth on Monday, and the company said it will fire any worker failing to report today.

The police, called to the plant by GM management, moved in when about 300 strikers blocking the main gates of the plant refused to disperse when ordered. They were among more than 1,000 workers who had been taunting new employees, hired to break the three-week-old strike, and threatening to attack them in their homes at night if they went to work.

Sixteen workers were arrested during the clash, but they were released on bail without being formally charged. About 20 were treated for dog bites or for cuts from the police whips, union officials said; two policemen were injured by stones thrown during the melee.

Further clashes appear possible today, with workers planning to gather at the plant gates again to demand the reinstatement of all strikers, including 567 fired last week, and to block the entrance of the 200 new employees recruited so far to replace them.

‘GM Wants to Crush Us’

“I am convinced that we could hold out against GM,” Fred Sauls, national secretary of the National Automobile and Allied Workers’ Union, said late Monday, blaming GM for the day’s trouble. “But we can’t hold out against the security forces. . . . GM wants to crush us, and it is willing to use the police, the army, the whole apartheid system to do so.”

GM’s embattled local management, which is scheduled to take over operations from the American auto maker in six weeks, does appear intent on forcing the strikers and the union into a win-or-lose showdown in the next few days. The union describes the work stoppage as a wildcat strike but supports its aims.

If the company succeeds in wooing back most of the 2,000 strikers, it believes it will not only break the strike but also the grip of “radicals” in the union. Most of the striking workers are blacks or Coloreds, as persons of mixed-race are officially classified here.

“We will still have disruptions, at least until the end of the year, but only outside the plant,” said Robert A. White, GM’s local managing director, who said he anticipates an early end to the strike and the resumption of production.

The way would then be cleared for GM’s sale, on still undisclosed terms, of its South African subsidiary to local managers and the American firm’s withdrawal from the country.

Could Go to Arbitration

The union’s principal points of dispute with the company, severance pay for all 3,000 workers plus the transfer of all pension funds to South Africa, could then be resolved by either arbitration or negotiation, company spokesmen said on Monday.

But business analysts here believe that if GM fails to quell the strike--in the face of angry threats to firebomb the homes of strikebreakers, to attack any GM vehicles driven into the black ghetto townships and perhaps to widen the strike to all auto companies--it might simply close, concluding that the limited profitability of its small 9% market share would not survive the turmoil.

“We have never resisted talking at any time,” White said, “but there is a core group within the union who want GM closed, an element who believe in disinvestment so strong that they just don’t want the company to operate.”

The auto workers union drew support on Monday from the 650,000-member Congress of South African Trade Unions, which castigated GM for “arrogant and high-handed actions” in planning for its subsidiary’s sale without discussing the plan with the union.

Endorsing the union’s demands on severance pay, pensions and other issues, which could set a precedent for other foreign companies withdrawing from South Africa, the labor federation said that workers want “companies intending to leave to negotiate with the workers through their trade unions about their future.”

GM officials said that about a third of the assembly workers reported Monday and that only limited production, far below the daily average of 150 cars, has been resumed. This will delay introduction of the German-designed Monza the company believes will help it increase its market share and become profitable within the next two years.

In Pretoria, the country’s Roman Catholic leadership met for 90 minutes with President Pieter W. Botha to ask for immediate steps to end apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial separation and minority white rule, but were told to “get their own house in order.”

Quoting Pope John Paul II’s remonstration that priests are “not social or political leaders,” Botha told a delegation of six senior Catholic bishops, who are among the sharpest critics of apartheid, that they themselves have contributed to the current unrest. He called the biweekly newspaper, New Nation, published by the church and aimed at a black audience, “dangerous” and described it as “unworthy of the Roman Catholic Church.”

Archbishop Denis E. Hurley of Durban, the president of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference, said the delegation’s appeals “fell on deaf ears.”

“The central theme was that unless the real substance of apartheid is dissolved, the problems will go on and intensify,” Hurley told a press conference later. “At a meeting like this, it makes it very difficult to hope.”