EDITORIAL NOTES

Let us re-build trade union unity and working class revolutionary cohesion:

Cosatu faces the dual challenges of globalised capital and internal divisions

As we go to press, Cosatu’s central executive committee (CEC) has just announced the expulsion of its long-serving general secretary, Cde Zwelinzima Vavi. The CEC indicated that this was a difficult and painful decision. The SACP has consistently argued that Cosatu must be allowed the space to conduct its own organisational and internal disciplinary processes, free from any external influences. We therefore respect the decision of Cosatu’s CEC, without underestimating the ongoing challenges that will continue to confront the federation and the broader working class in South Africa.

In its official statement on the matter, the SACP stated: “Cosatu has for some while now been faced with serious problems of maintaining unity, cohesion and discipline.” Referring, among other things, to the expulsion of the former general secretary, the statement said it “cannot be cause for celebration for any progressive or revolutionary organisation”.

It was important for the SACP to unambiguously state its position in this way, because much of the commercial media has tried to portray the SACP as a factional force within Cosatu. Our support for both the independence of the federation and for the importance of a radical trade union formation fearlessly active within the ANC-led alliance is not factionalist. A powerful trade union federation that is prepared to be critical of government without becoming simply anti-state or oppositionist by definition is what conservatives of all stripes most fear.

However, we need to understand what has been happening as more than the clash of personalities, audit reports and scandals within the union movement. We need to appreciate the complex underlying factors that have led to the current turmoil. In this editorial, we can only sketch in the briefest terms some of the key underlying issues that must be understood.

In the first place, we need to appreciate the massive, neoliberal- driven global restructuring of the working class, under-way since at least the 1980s. Before the onset of the late 20th century wave of globalisation, labour markets that were open to transnational, private corporate investment had about 1-billion workers and work seekers. By 2000, the labour force in these countries had risen to 1,5-billion.

Meanwhile, China’s liberal reforms from the late-1970s, and the collapse of the former Soviet bloc countries at the end of the 1980s, added a further 1,5-billion according to Guy Standing (The Precariat – the New Dangerous Class). As a result, “the labour supply in the globalising economies trebled. The newcomers came with little capital and with very low wages, altering the world’s capital-labour ratio and weakening the bargaining position of workers”.   (Standing)

The weakened bargaining position affected workers in the advanced capitalist countries themselves. Reagan and Thatcher launched vicious attacks against the union movements in their respective societies from which the unions have never fully recovered to this day. The neo-liberal “flexible labour market” lobby intensified, with threats of disinvestment and re-location to low-wage economies if worker rights were not rolled back.

For a variety of reasons, South Africa was at first partially insulated from these global developments. Through the 1980s, South Africa’s not insignificant monopoly capitalist sector could not easily follow its international peer group on the globalisation freeway in pursuit of high profits in low wage economies. Anti-apartheid economic and financial sanctions, as well as apartheid state defensive measures (tough exchange control measures, for instance) made taking the on-ramp to trans-nationalisation a very difficult proposition for our local monopoly sector.

Moreover, the rising, semi-insurrectionary struggles against apartheid, and the complicity of monopoly capital in the apartheid system, added to local trade union strength. Increasingly, workplace, community and wider political struggles reinforced each other and further contributed to South African monopoly capital finding itself relatively off-balance.

Paradoxically, as the Central Committee political report published in this issue notes, our 1994 democratic breakthrough changed these realities. The 1994 breakthrough certainly brought a series of real gains for the progressive trade union movement – not least a range of progressive labour laws (including the Basic Conditions of Employment and the Labour Relations acts).

However, with the lifting of apartheid-era economic sanctions, complemented by excessive and ill-judged ANC-led government liberalisation from the mid-1990s, South Africa’s monopoly capital sector was now able to happily take the globalisation free-way. This has seen massive disinvestment, foreign stock exchange listings, transfer pricing, tax evasion, de-industrialisation and formal sector job losses. At the very moment that South Africa’s progressive trade union movement began to reap the labour market legislation fruits of its heroic and decades-long struggle, these gains were being actively eroded in practice.

As has often been remarked, both the South African government and the labour movement now increasingly confront all of the private sector giants of our economy (the likes of SA Breweries – now SAB Miller, Sasol, De Beers, Investec, Anglo, Old Mutual, etc) as if they were foreign investors. The further erosion of trade union power in our country has been due to the rapid expansion of so-called “a-typical” work (which more and more has become the norm) –   informalisation, casualisation, often associated with labour-brokering.

These developments in South Africa have been advanced by another phenomenon closely associated with the last three-decades of accelerated capitalist-driven globalisation – massive waves of labour migration. Punishing structural adjustment programmes imposed on developing societies (the counterpart of the Thatcherite rolling back of the welfare state in the advanced capitalist economies), and the ongoing accelerated penetration of transnational agri-business into peasant economies in the South have produced massive floods of migration from the countryside to informal settlements in teeming cities in the developing world, and from developing countries into the advanced economies.

Today, the most militarised international border in the world is not between North and South Korea, but between the US and Mexico. It is designed to keep desperate (but “illegal”) work-seekers out. However, as Saskia Sassen and others have eloquently demonstrated, there is a deep hypocrisy in this. Tens of millions of desperate, “illegal” work seekers nonetheless still find their way into the US and Europe.

As Sassen writes: “what looks like failure from the perspective of controlling entry is actually delivering results that particular sectors inside the US want from immigrants.” Key sectors of the US economy (like agriculture, retail and hospitality services) require large numbers of low-paid workers. Their “illegal” status means they are prepared to accept low wages and precarious working conditions. While a highly weaponised border sustains the charade of illegality, “US governments, regardless of political party, have repeatedly shown a strong reluctance to allocate funds and create jobs to inspect workplaces”. (Sassen)

Although our own South African social and regional realities are somewhat different, millions of “illegals”, desperate work-seekers from throughout the continent, displaced by imperialist-driven structural adjustment programmes, climate change, and civil wars, have poured into post-apartheid South Africa. Many hundreds of thousands are super-exploited, non-unionised workers in agriculture, mining and hospitality services. This, too, has impacted on the relative bargaining strength of the South African labour movement. Mirroring, with their own local characteristics, global trends, these are some of the factors that have weakened the power of the South African labour movement in the face of active monopoly capital strategies.

It would be wrong, however, to think of our trade unions, and of Cosatu in particular, as if they were simply passive victims of a global process. Over the past 20 years Cosatu, typically in alliance with the SACP, has fought many important battles, some of them rear-guard actions in the face of local neo-liberal inspired interventions. The Cosatu-SACP left-wing axis, for instance, was absolutely critical in the provisional defeat of the major privatisation strategy unleashed by the ANC-led government in the early 2000s.

Likewise, trade union pressure on the ANC-government led to early state-led industrial policy initiatives, which have now been consolidated into the centrepiece of governments’ progressive, inclusive-growth strategies. An early leader in this process and the major beneficiary to date of these policies has been Numsa and its historical worker base in the auto and auto components sector. It is ironic, therefore, that it is precisely the Numsa leadership (now expelled from Cosatu) that has led the anti-state, regime-change opposition within the   federation.

If external factors have played a major role in creating the context for the turmoil and splits within Cosatu, there are, of course, important internal factors as well. Critical among these is what Sakhela Buhlungu has described as the “paradox of victory”. The victories of the trade union movement, born out of its central role in the antiapartheid struggle, have seen significant institutional advances with real dangers of bureaucratisation. In many cases there has been a growing distance between an office-bound leadership and the factory-floor membership.

Cosatu affiliates have themselves not been immune to the dangers of the “sins of incumbency” attributed frequently to the ANC as  a ruling party. Faced with the restructuring of the working class, unions predominantly active in the private industrial sectors have increasingly become focused on (or defensively confined to) the more formal and better paid worker strata – a challenge confronting both the two major rivals in the recent past (NUM and Numsa).

Public sector workers (with the exception of municipal workers) have, generally, not been buffeted by the global neo-liberal restructuring of the working class to the same extent as those in the private sector. Membership of these unions has grown significantly post-1994. However, in several public sector unions there are cases of confusion between union functions and public sector managerial responsibilities. In these cases there are dangers of union leadership positions being abused to advance personal careers within the public service, rather than the active servicing of grass-roots members.

An even graver danger for worker solidarity is the phenomenon of “business unionism”. In the recent past the SACP has increasingly spoken out about this problem. The major unions all have nominal control over multi-billion rand retirement funds. These, in turn, have been leveraged to set up union investment arms. In principle, if subjected to democratic worker control and guided by clear strategic objectives, these investment arms have the potential to be a critical pillar of a solidarity economy – investing, for instance, in desperately needed social wage assets like affordable public transport or public housing. Sadly, in practice, they have often become entry-points through which the capitalist class has inserted its DNA into the head-offices of many unions. Much of the recent turmoil within Cosatu affiliates is to be located in competing factions seeking to control these resources.

The current challenges within the trade union movement are a wake-up call for all progressive formations in South Africa. As we seek to recover the proud traditions of our revolutionary labour movement there are several basic principles that must be observed:

l We need to appreciate that worker democracy within unions, and the servicing of workers in their daily shop-floor struggles is of paramount importance. Only a determined re-dedication to these tasks will counter the dangers of bureaucratic deviation and business unionism.

l The massive restructuring of the working class, placing large sectors of workers in “a-typical” employment effectively beyond the reach of traditional unionism, requires innovation. There are at least two dimensions to addressing these challenges. Is the manner in which unions are currently structured appropriate to the globalised organisation of production? This is a question that Numsa has placed on the agenda – unfortunately in a highly factionalist manner, seeking to justify its cannibalising of membership from other unions.

This does not mean, however, that a principled debate should not be undertaken on new forms of union organisation, along productive value-chains, for instance. l Responding to a massive non-unionised “precariat” also means recovering previous struggle traditions, notably the re-building of active solidarity between work-place and community struggles.

This talks not just to internal union weaknesses, but also to the organisational and campaigning challenges of ANC and SACP local-level branches. It also raises questions around the numerous local level struggles in townships and the imperative of linking more effectively with them.

l Finally, above all, it is critical that progressives understand that a timid and uncritical stance by unions towards government, on the one hand, and (the flip-side of the same coin) worker mobilisation on the basis of a regime-change, anti-state oppositionism both play into the agenda of monopoly capital within the current realities of our society.

The trade union movement in our country stands at the crossroads. The dangers of increased intra-worker contest and of lose-lose union rivalry over membership with ordinary workers treated merely as cannon fodder to be mobilised demagogically into untimely and ill-considered actions on behalf of union head-office ambitions is very real. On the other hand, the traditions of worker solidarity and of militant shop-floor struggle have not disappeared. The SACP is convinced that the great majority of Cosatu unionists, the tens of thousands of shop stewards, and the millions of organised workers in the federation’s ranks will, once more, not fail the  revolution.