Report by Labour and Development Bureau, Umsebenzi Online, on the speech by Solly Mapaila, SACP Second Deputy General Secretary, to the NUM National Bargaining Conference, March 11 2015

 "You cannot undermine your own organisation and expect to lead it",

The South African Communist Party (SACP) supports your collective bargaining struggles; and if you embark on strike action should the necessity arise, the Party will be with you right on the ground in support of your demands; we will march with you to the bosses, said SACP Second Deputy General Secretary Cde Solly Mapaila. Mapaila was addressing the National Union of Mineworkers' (NUM's) National Bargaining Conference on Wednesday, 11 March 2015.

The NUM is holding the conference to reflect on the economic and social challenges facing workers in the country in general and in the sectors organised by the union in particular, namely mining, energy and construction. The conference, which ends today, is expected to adopt the wage demands that the union will table to the employers for negotiation during this year's round of collective bargaining. Current agreements will expire from June.

Combine bargaining, organising and campaigning, and build a strong union.

Mapaila said "The SACP calls on the NUM to combine collective bargaining with organising and campaigning. In fact collective bargaining must be seen as a campaign which can only succeed to achieve its objectives on the basis of, and by contributing to, a strong and campaigning union". He warned against wishful thinking.

"Such a tendency can only bargain away the jobs of workers and is dangerous to allow", he said. Mapaila said this in the backdrop of thousands of mineworkers who were dismissed in the Rustenburg platinum belt and elsewhere in the aftermath of the international capitalist system crisis and the various labour-capital disputes which followed. Many of the dismissed workers, including those who suffered from intimidation and violence unleased by misguided "militancy" are yet to be re-employed or find new jobs.

Mapaila further linked collective bargaining modelling to trade union strength. He pointed out that there was still a long way to go towards achieving the Congress of South African Trade Unions' (Cosatu's) objective of centralised bargaining. He said the fragmentations suffered by the labour movement in the aftermath of the international capitalist system crisis complicated the context. He however called for support for centralised bargaining, but cautioned that it must be buttressed by a strong union organisation.

In South Africa, he pointed out, collective bargaining is fragmented with no industry-wide bargaining except to a greater extent in the public sector. There are mainly two levels of centralised bargaining in the public sector, namely public service administration bargaining and local government bargaining. The private sector is characterised by different articulations of sectoral bargaining and many elements of what Mapaila called "door-to-door" bargaining. Under "door-to-door" bargaining, some unions negotiate with individual employers, while in other cases they negotiate with different campuses of the same employer separately.  

Link collective bargaining to the struggle of control over production.

"The SACP further calls on workers to combine collective bargaining with the struggle of control over workplace structuring", said Mapaila. Uncontested, he said, the bosses will restructure employment relationships, workforce levels and production processes to deepen exploitation; they will make sure that rather than "a hair-cut" from profit it is labour itself that will (continue to) pay for the new value of collective bargaining achievements, this over and above restructuring to produce more at the same or reduced levels of the workforce.

He implied that collective bargaining starts in real terms the moment an agreement is concluded, and must be sustained by means of consistent struggles to defend negotiated gains from being eroded through restructuring. "The bosses can concede to meagre wage increases on the one hand (collective bargaining) and take more on the other hand (restructuring)", he said. Mapaila called on delegates to go beyond narrow wage demands but look at the working, employment and living conditions of the workers, their families and communities holistically when they finalise the demands from the workers. 

National minimum wage

Mapaila reaffirmed SACP's support for a national minimum wage, quoting the Freedom Charter stating that "There shall be a forty-hour working week, a national minimum wage, paid annual leave, and sick leave for all workers, and maternity leave on full pay for all working mothers".

He cautioned, however, that the national minimum wage was not an end in itself but a means to an end. "Strong trade unions will still be required under the conditions of a national minimum wage because the bosses will as usual treat the minimum for workers as if it were the maximum", he said. Mapaila emphasised that rather than shift their attention from the bosses, "it will remain important for trade unions to maintain their focus on those exploiters". This in order to improve from the minimum levels of wage income, employment and working conditions which must lead, not only to decent work but decent life.

Don't lose the campus; there is a bigger picture!

Having affirmed the importance of collective bargaining, Mapaila cautioned against creating illusions that it will solve all the problems workers are facing. He quoted the world renowned social scientist and revolutionary Karl Marx saying that daily struggles such as collective bargaining should not make workers:

"...to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market".

Mapaila was categorical that the most sustainable solution lies in steeling living and social wage campaigns fought through collective bargaining and political action, workplace restructuring and other economic and political struggles in the broader struggle for socialism. The exploitative wages system will be abolished under socialism; this will for the first time make it possible to achieve social emancipation, he asserted.

Moses Kotane and JB Marks

He called on delegates to reflect on the significance of the repatriation of the mortal remains of Moses Kotane and John ‘Beaver' (JB) Marks from Moscow where they were buried during the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Kotane and Marks epitomised unity; they did not just talk about it; they worked for it; and they were honest, said Mapaila. He pointed out to the exemplary role that Kotane and Marks played in building and uniting the African National Congress (ANC), the Communist Party, the progressive trade union movement, and the liberation alliance that the "three components of our struggle for national and social emancipation" formed.

Mapaila warned those who attack the alliance that they will not succeed. "Those liars who want the people in South Africa and abroad to believe that it is the ANC-headed liberation Alliance that created racialised and gendered class inequality, unemployment and poverty cannot be revolutionaries. No revolution can ever take place on the basis of lies", he said to the applause of delegates.  

Mapaila could not complete his address without posing questions for constructive self-criticism on the part of Cosatu and the NUM. "What would Kotane and Marks say about the state of Cosatu today? What particularly would JB Marks, who organised and led the African Mineworkers' Union, say about the state of the NUM today and what happened in the Rustenburg platinum belt?"

Mapaila called on the delegates to think deeper about these two questions and the tasks consequently arising from the serious enquiry which they must be accorded. He said that "you cannot undermine your own organisation and then expect to lead it. If leaders believed that their organisation was undermining them then they should leave; no individual is above the collective organisation and its collective leadership", affirmed Mapaila to the applause of the delegates who thanked him with resounding revolutionary songs.   

This report was first published in Umsebenzi Online, the SACP's online journal.

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