The Congress
of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) was formed in 1985 as a
federation of several black unions fighting against extreme political
opposition from the Apartheid government. As a single organisation
that represented and fought for many unions (some of them quite
small), it was very powerful and eventually became the second
principal anti-Apartheid force operating inside South Africa,
alongside the United Democratic Front.
Though
birthed as a political force, its unionist roots were also strong.
The need to fight for better working conditions for black workers was
huge and pressing.
In
an article on the recent Marikana shootings, Jon Soske, an assistant
professor of modern African history at McGill University, described a
1981 strike at the Penge asbestos mine in what would later become
Limpopo: “In July 1981, 1,700 workers at the Penge asbestos mine in
the Northwestern Transvaal struck after a bitter, two-year struggle
for recognition by the Black Allied Mine and Construction Workers
Union. After four days, the mine owners fired all of the workers, who
then responded by occupying the living compounds attached to the
mine.
“The
company brought in scabs and petitioned the South African supreme
court to evict the mineworkers: since the strike was technically
illegal, the company claimed that the workers had quit their jobs,
and therefore had no right to remain in its quarters. Predictably,
the Pretoria court ruled in the mine owner’s favour; the company
offered to re-employ 1,000 of the striking workers at reduced wages.
The strikers refused.
“Given
the absence of ventilation and other basic safety measures, most of
the workers faced a slow and excruciating death from silicosis if
they returned to work. One trade unionist later explained: ‘We
don’t envisage a situation where we would choose to die in order to
earn very little. We’d rather starve than sell our lives’,”
Soske wrote.
The story was
the same in factories, mines and farms around the country. Cosatu’s
vehicle for achieving basic human and socio-economic rights for
workers was through partnership with the African National Congress
(ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). The relationship
among the three was tangled to the point where several prominent
Cosatu members sat on the National Executive Committee of the ANC and
on the Central Committee of the SACP. This relationship remains till
this day, where the secretary-general of the ANC was only recently
replaced as the chairman of the communist party by the president of
Cosatu’s largest affiliate, the National Union of Mineworkers
(NUM).
When
the ANC government went into power in 1994, the foundations for the
relationship within the tripartite alliance changed. It was no longer
about opposition to Apartheid and installing a popular government,
but about advancing rights and rolling back years of inequality and
injustice. However, the ANC as government of the day, and Cosatu as a
major union federation, were bound to be on a collision course.
The clashes began
as unions like the National Education Health and Allied Workers Union
(Nehawu) and the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu)
took to the streets to demand better wages and better working
conditions from their employer, the ANC-led government.
The
Mbeki government’s Aids policy would also be another area of
friction between Cosatu’s politics and its duty to protect its
workers and members. In February 2002, the federation’s president,
Willy Madisha called for
the government to provide anti-retroviral drugs to the five million
South Africans living with HIV/Aids. He said he voted for the ANC
thinking it would take care of the most vulnerable members of the
society. “The case of people living with HIV is a litmus test of
our revolution,” he said.
But Cosatu
was also never far from playing politics with the ANC. This role
became more emphasised as the years went by. The focus turned up even
more when Thabo Mbeki sacked Jacob Zuma as deputy president. The
union federation was one of Zuma’s most reliable allies, and its
goal in electing him was to change the economic policies away from
Mbeki’s more market-friendly economic growth focus to a more
state-centred, jobs-focused one. Against sometimes incredible odds,
Zuma won, but the big economic shift didn’t happen.
Ahead of the
ANC’s Mangaung elective conference in December, Cosatu now seems
undecided about the man it helped put in power. Such is the
federation’s preoccupation with the ruling party that it has an
effect on leadership dynamics within member unions. At its congress
in March, NUM took a resolution to support Zuma at the Mangaung
congress and rejected wholesale nationalisation as a solution to the
country’s rampant inequality. Fellow Cosatu member—and NUM
rival—National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) then
afterwards resolved to remove Zuma and the entire NEC for failing to
implement the resolutions of the congress at Polokwane in 2008.
The jostling
between the two unions prompted Cosatu General Secretary Zwelinzima
Vavi to issue a statement asking all affiliate unions to stop. “We
discourage any premature discussion on the succession debate, because
it distracts us from the primary political tasks of taking forward
our transformation mandate,” he said.
Many
unions also went corporate, NUM being an extreme example. According
to a leaked document obtained by the Mail & Guardian, NUM General
Secretary Frans Baleni’s total salary package is now more than
R100,000 a month. “Confidential documents in possession of
the M&G show
that Baleni receives a basic salary of R77,000 a month and his total
salary package is just more than R105,000 a month. This makes him one
of the highest-paid unionists in South Africa,” the M&G said.
The
Mineworkers Investment Company,
wholly owned by NUM, boasted a R2.8-billion portfolio in June 2011.
Union fees are also a lucrative business. NUM collected about R209
million from its 310,820 members in 2011, according to the City
Press.
It also revealed that the MIC may have made some money through deals
and ventures with mining houses, even though it has repeatedly said
it doesn’t invest in the industry it organises in.
As
poverty continues to dog South Africa, the unions may now be falling
on the wrong side of the inequality equation. Even though living
standards areimproving thanks
to government grants, large chunks of the population still live in
dire poverty.
The events
preceding the 16 August shootings at the Marikana mine of Lonmin PLC
suggest Cosatu’s union in the area may be drifting away from the
poorest workers. The formation of the Association of Mineworkers and
Construction Union (Amcu) by former NUM members has been a major
thorn in the side of NUM. In some mines, NUM represented only 50% of
the workers employed, with the others choosing not to be represented
at all. Amcu was able to exploit this gap by recruiting rapidly among
these disgruntled workers. Since NUM was the bargaining principle at
most of these mines, it was seen to be the one close to the company.
Interviews with striking rock drill operators at Wonderkop near
Marikana revealed most thought the Cosatu affiliate had become too
close to management and didn’t represent worker demands well enough
anymore. Cosatu has bristled at these allegations.
The
affiliated South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu)
also faces a challenge from the break-away National Transport Allied
Workers Union (Natawu), led by former Satawu President Ephraim
Mphahlele.
Vavi recently
called the splinter unions “the biggest onslaught waged by the
bourgeoisie against the living standards of the working class.”
“In
sectors as vulnerable as mining, transport and cleaning, the real
beneficiaries of these divisions are the capitalists who own and
control our economy today,” he said.
In a press
statement, Cosatu blamed the violence at Marikana on inequality,
driven by company owners and managers. “The underlying problems
which give rise to incidents like those at Marikana are the stark
levels of inequality in South Africa and the super-exploitation of
workers by ruthless and rapacious employers. Since they discovered
diamonds, gold and platinum these greedy companies forced people from
all over Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa to go down every day deep in
the bowels of the earth and dig out precious stones,” the statement
said. “They work in most dangerous conditions in high temperatures,
in damp and poorly ventilated areas where rocks fall daily, killing
many and condemning others to a life in a wheelchair and the loss of
limbs. Some families have never even had the chance to bury their
breadwinners, whose bones remain buried underground.”
The
inequality is indeed stark: Lonmin Chief Financial Officer Alan
Ferguson reportedly earns about R10,254,980 a year, while rock-drill
operators at that company make about 150 times less than that. In the
context of South Africa’s stark inequality and poverty, the
pittance earned by miners is justifiable cause for anger, but it does
not stack favourably with the amount earned by Baleni, the general
secretary of the union that supposedly represents them. The gap
between union and poor worker is growing as more people join the
higher earnings brackets and, ironically, can therefore afford union
fees more, which in turn give the union more money.
But Cosatu’s
biggest problem may just be its endless focus on politics. If Numsa
and NUM are busy fighting over Zuma, who is in the bargaining
councils, fighting for the workers against Zuma’s government? The
state of the labour market in the platinum industry strongly suggests
that Cosatu’s unions have taken their eye off the ball.
Cosatu’s
national congress will be in September, and it will give clarity as
to what the response to the weaknesses shown up by Lonmin and the
splinter unions will be. Unfortunately the initial signs aren’t
good. The federation is not prepared to blame itself from moving away
from the poor, but rather sees the whole thing as a plot orchestrated
by capitalists to weaken it. This kind of defensiveness may
permanently blind it from the divide that it building.
The divide
was best illustrated by a meeting that took place between NUM
President Senzeni Zokwana and the miners at Marikana a few days
before the shootings took place. Summoned to address the miners his
union purports to act on behalf of, Zokwana had to speak to them from
the safety of an armoured truck for fear of his own life.
