GM Walkout Ended in South Africa

The three-week strike at the General Motors Corp. plant in Port Elizabeth ended Tuesday, but without resolution of the main issues stemming from the American auto maker’s plans to sell its South African subsidiary to local managers.

George Stegmann, GM’s director of personnel and public relations in South Africa, said that all but 200 of the company’s 1,800 production workers returned before a report-or-be-fired deadline and that preparations are under way to resume full production within a few days.

Despite clashes between the strikers and whip-wielding police on Monday outside the plant gates, the workers’ return on Tuesday was peaceful. Officials of the National Automobile and Allied Workers’ Union, however, described their members as angry and bitter over GM’s request for police intervention.

Arbitration Agreed To

The union’s demands for full severance pay for all workers and for the transfer of their pension funds to South Africa will be submitted to arbitration, as requested by the union, in the next month. The managers of the new company will also consider a request for union representation on their board of directors.

“Definitely, the strike has been effectively broken,” said Fred Sauls, the union’s national secretary, “but it was broken mainly by the police, not management.” Workers had nonetheless feared the loss of their jobs in a city where black unemployment reaches 60%, Sauls acknowledged.

“There is still a lot of ill feeling,” he said, “and it should not be expected (that) because workers have gone back, they will forget what has happened.”

Rehiring Process

To alleviate some of the bitterness, Stegmann said, the auto maker has begun rehiring most of the 567 workers dismissed last week, when they refused to end a sit-in at the plant and were removed by riot police and troops. Recruitment of replacement workers, who were attacked Monday as “scabs,” has also been suspended.

Before the strike, the plant had about 2,300 production workers, virtually all of whom joined the stoppage, and 1,000 clerical and management staffers.

“Throughout this situation, we have been willing to talk,” Stegmann said, “but not in a strike situation. . . . We appreciate our workers’ very real apprehensions, and we have tried to allay those concerns. But we believed and insisted that these should be discussed while production continued so as to ensure the company’s economic viability.”

Keeping Company Alive

In forcing the showdown with the union on Tuesday, General Motors felt it was fighting to preserve the deal in which local managers would take over its South African subsidiary rather than close down the operation.

If they cannot get GM’s new German-designed Monza onto the market in early January, company officials said, they have little hope of preserving, let alone enlarging the company’s 9% market share, and if they agree to workers’ demands for full severance pay, the sale could collapse financially.

“No company can afford to give in to irrational and irresponsible demands,” Stegmann commented. “What we were dealing with involved ideological and political issues--obviously issues that other companies in this country will have to face and deal with.”