shadow Boxing?

Cosatu, social Movements and the AnC government.

Ashwin Desai argues that Cosatu has much to gain by linking up with the social movements and, in turn, offers these movements greater political clarity, national links and resources.

At the ringside “I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it. I was intrigued by how one moved one’s body to protect oneself, how one used a strategy both to attack and retreat, how one paced oneself over a match”. Nelson Mandela

A trade union, like a boxer, is only as good as his last fight. There are few things more pathetic than watching exhibition matches by impoverished legends of the ring – Max Schmeling, George Foreman, Mike Tyson – blundering about throwing ineffectual roundhouses at men half their age and calibre and then, around about the third round, succumbing to a body blow or sucker punch.

And so, forgive me if I do not come here to sing Cosatu’s praises of a time when it was a fit and fearsome champion – world champion perhaps of class and national liberation struggle. For the last few years, it has grieved many to see Cosatu, punch drunk, scarcely able to lift its hands against an onslaught of right upper-cuts from lightweight nationalist parliamentarians, bar-room brawlers in the ANC, the rank amateurs of the Youth League and, at the risk of seeming sexist, handbag waving ministers. At the same time, Cosatu’s attempts to push back the frontiers of control on the shop- floor have floundered. In fact, the captains of industry have in many cases managed to re-assert ‘managerial prerogative’ over corners of the work- place they lost control of in the cauldron of the 1980s.

Luckily a body politic is capable of regeneration. There are signs that the cut-men have stemmed the flow of blood and that some in Cosatu have hauled out that old skipping rope and got back into a training programme again. Beneath the ideological flabbiness of Alliance-speak emerges the six-pack that comes from taking Principled Stands: purging certain politically corrupt officials and office-bearers and decrying the scandals of government’s Zimbabwe, HIV/Aids and BEE policy. You know what it takes better than I do to get fighting fit again. You alone know how strong your new opponents are, especially those who used to train with you in the same communist gym. I will not presume to give you advice on how to run your organisation, when to throw punches or get your corner in order. I am no trainer. I come with a few tit-bits of advice for gaining more fans among the lumpen audience, so that the road that lies immediately ahead is a bit shorter.

Think of me as a political dietician (no disrespect to Dr. Manto) come to share some of my views, both as a sociologist and activist, about what you need to eat and who you need to eat with as you get back into shape.

shadow Boxing?

It is “like a broken CD that just keeps repeating itself. The Alliance, including COSATU, is generally sidelined from the process of policy formulation and transformation for most of the ten years of governance. Then, six months before elections, without even a Summit to formally endorse the elections strategy of the Manifesto, we get drawn into election task teams that work efficiently to mobilise the base and rally the troops. In the victory celebrations, the public hugging follows. Yet a few months down the line, the reality of being sidelined returns, leading to public disagreements over key policy directions” (COSATU, 2004).

The life of a sparring partner can be tough.

To change your lot in life my first advice as a dietician is eat humble pie. Many within your ranks have held onto the delusion that your association with the ANC would make a meaningful change to the lives of the broad working class. Instead you have witnessed the ANC change from an organisation enunciating policies of collective liberation into one seeking individual emancipation. “The new ethos and morals imposed by crass materialism have been brought to the fore by the head of ANC Presidency’s defence of his right to make money quickly. He is quoted as having said that, ‘I did not join the struggle to become poor ’” (COSATU, 2004). Now you have been reduced to needing the ANC more than it needs you (except during campaigning every election year). I am not here suggesting that your success as a federation needs to be judged by whether a socialist revolution has taken place in Azania or not. No! In the new world order, especially with the impossibility of autarchies and the collapse of the USSR, that was a fight no one would blame you from postponing. Conditions did not pertain for a knockout blow and perhaps never will. But it was a time for a wearing down of opponents, round by round. Always advancing, and always knowing who is in your corner and who is defecting to the other side of the class struggle.

But, measured with even this far more modest and reformist tape, Cosatu has failed to win even moderate levels of hegemony in post-apartheid South Africa. Even within the paradigm of what is regarded as sound, free-market policies, you have failed to exert yourself within the Alliance for the better of your constituency. Even while keeping the budget-deficit within the preferred range of the Washington Consensus, you could have done far more to ensure pro-worker policies in respect of:

1          the strength of the rand;

2          inflation targeting;

3                      excessive and unaccountable military spending at the expense of social welfare and education;

4                      a proper and functional national skills de- velopment programme;

5          a basic income grant;

6          a meaningful public works programme;

7                      a comprehensive roll-out of HIV/Aids medication;

8          tariff-barrier reductions;

9            ameliorative industrial strategy measures in the collapsing clothing and textile industry or does the 2010 Soccer World Cup count;

10   broad-based black economic empowerment as opposed to crony-capitalism

Whatever concessions might have been made around privatisation recently flow, I would suggest, from a government anxious about previously botched listings, too much foreign control of key- parastatals and an over-exposed pool of ANC- aligned BEE partners. Cosatu should claim no easy victories, as if in response to two sparring sessions that ensured the ‘big guy’ never really got hurt, Cabinet has genuinely gone southpaw, made a so- called left turn.

To me, these failures are not only the result of ideological confusion. There is, in my contact with many ordinary officials and shopstewards in affiliates of Cosatu, a genuine will to class struggle. I have detected relatively few Mbeki-sycophants in the rank and file. It’s hard to be a sycophant from

a position of insecurity about your job, low wages, deaths from Aids all around, while a small black elite join the whites at the trough of corruption and profiteering where they make out that its your own individual failing that you’re not driving an X5 and winning tenders right and left.

However, reluctance to buy the SA success story myth does not translate into sufficient confidence to attack the myth, or the ruling party that makes them poor. Among the rank and file, there is a reluctance to challenge this state of affairs mainly because there is a sense of strategic exhaustion not ideological confusion. Ordinary people remain remarkably clear about what is to be done, but how, remains the question.

This question arises because acts of popular illegality, insurrectionary acts, are deemed to be out of order in the new democratic order. There are some interesting ideas floating around as to why this is. Even in social movements that have no connection or alliance to the ruling party in government, an uncanny commitment to the rule of law exists. I will not deal with the reason for this here. I recognise that these inhibitions exist. Because they do, it is far harder to mount effective counter- power than in the past.

But let’s face it. You get nowhere staying within the boundaries of the law. Whatever else it does, the law protects the status quo, it only permits conduct that is safe in substance and form for those who made the laws. Of course, the law permits changes that are in the interest of the powers that be, but the discourse of transformation has limits that are quite severe once one tries to go beyond their template. And it is because they sense the limitations of the power that they can legally muster that many members of Cosatu have let themselves and their organisation go. What are these traditional and legal forms of exercise of power that no longer work:-

1. The protected wage strike has had its teeth pulled. First there is an expanding army of the skilled unemployed, the desperately unemployed, to act as scabs during strikes. Strike rules, moreover, have made of the once proud toyi-toyi, a tame and symbolic thing. The moment it no longer gently per-

suades, it is interdicted with costs and “ring- leaders” get fired when the strike is over.

2. Workplace forums were a fraud, a joke, a trick from day one. The exercise of worker control through these mechanisms is absent in over 80% of South African firms;

3. Labour law jurisprudence is on a steady rightward slide. At the back of every Judge’s mind in collective disputes is “what is the effect of my ruling going to be on investor confidence and thereby Gear”?

4. The courts have adopted dogmatically severe positions in individual misconduct matters and, like the Anglican Church under Henry VIII did with his wives, our courts find any servile excuse to bless the bosses discarding of chattels they no longer want through retrenchments and tactical insolven- cies;

 

5. Lobbying government has got you nowhere.

You are held in contempt by the presidency and Nedlac is routinely by-passed on mat- ters of import;

 

6. Socio-economic protest action has been sparingly used, partly because of legal im- pediments. When it has been used it too has been symbolic and its demands framed in a narrow workerist manner.

 

 

I believe that if a more effective mechanism for the exercise of power was to be imagined, Cosatu leadership would find a rank and file only too ready for class struggle, as long as it was not just another damp-squib strike and memorandum handover.

 

A left hook?

“Whereas traditional trade unions defend the economic interests of a limited category of workers, we need to create labour organisations that can represent the entire network of singularities that collaboratively produce wealth. One modest proposal that points in this direction, for example, involves opening up trade unions to other segments of society by merging them with the powerful social movements that have emerged in recent years.” (Hardt and Negri, 2004, 137).

As your dietician, after humble pie, I would recommend the olive branch. This needs to be extended to community movements that some in Cosatu were fond of labelling “ultra-leftist” in 1999 when they began to emerge in Durban, Soweto and Cape Town. Having become the new “ultra-leftists” yourselves and groggy from the right upper-cuts

of those who so crudely and stupidly lash out with these words, Cosatu needs to begin extending the hand of friendship – if not complete ideological agreement – to the Anti Privatisation Forums

(APF), eThekweni Social Forums and Anti-Eviction Campaigns of South Africa. Progressive civil society in South Africa is not limited to legal NGOs like the TAC. Here you will not only find potential allies but also thousands of former members, many of whom make up the leadership of what you have derisively referred to ‘single issue’ and ‘particularistic’ movements in SA. While these labels have veracity, it is pretty rich coming from a federation whose unions have been signing onto productivity and outsourcing agreements that entrench ‘managerial prerogative’ as long as the ‘single issue’ of the annual wage increase is delivered.

In its interaction with community movements and indeed all social struggles outside the workplace, Cosatu must bear in mind that efforts to assume control over these struggles will be warded off. Classical notions of leadership, vanguardism and organisation that informed the struggles of the past have been transcended by these new social movements who will not be content to give up their autonomy in broad fronts, displaying “revolutionary discipline” and backing down every time the President becomes piqued at what they do.

You must also not expect traditional meeting procedures or constitutions and membership lists. Many of these organisations are nebulous. This does not mean they are weak or ineffective. Unlike the Leviathans of national labour bureaucracies, they move ‘like butterflies and sting like bees’.

They are indeed as you have called them a “motley crew” acting in a “side-show” (COSATU, 2000b). But when under attack by municipalities trying to evict, or cut water they have shown themselves to be tough, brave and composed of thousands. But these same thousands are grannies and kids, single mothers and the unemployed, priests and sometimes even gangsters who disappear into their normal lives after the crisis is over, leaving a relatively small core of two dozen or so trusted people to tend to the affairs of the movement. And because of the immediately conflictual and episodic nature of relationships, uncontrolled by corporatist scripts, community activists are not prone to ‘taking a dive’, unlike many unionists if Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana is to believed: “Unionists are too busy drinking tea with management instead of listening and attending to workers’ complaints” (Business Report, January 31, 2005).

Do not expect ideological purity from these movements. Do not expect that even the leadership will know about the WTO or the World Bank.

This is not entirely their fault. But they know their enemies. It is the mayor, local councillor (whatever his or her party) and their armed henchmen, most immediately. And in the distance, they probably can see Pretoria’s hand, and know that in turn, the councillors are also pawns in the game, with budgets tightened and Municipal Financial Management Act threats made by Trevor Manuel and his treasury enforcers. This is unlike the ideological flabbiness rampant in unions: “We are not there to fight management, we are there to support our families. We are part and parcel of management, not officially, but according to our constitution as a union. To be a leader, you are supposed to see both sides.” (NUMSA shop- steward, quoted in Von Holdt, 2003, 184). Do not undermine the social movements’ immediate choice of targets for it is their closeness to their foe that makes them so strong. But I am sure they could benefit from a more structural and macro-economic understanding of their oppression that you could bring to them. Social movements also need to recognise the limitations of a ‘go it alone’ strategy. Many of the ‘community movements’ are parochial and insular, seemingly unable or unwilling to breach the boundaries of inherited ‘group areas’. These community movements especially will benefit from Cosatu’s national linkages, resources and legitimacy and it is incumbent on them to reach out to their class allies.

As the transition unfolds it is becoming increasingly clear that it does not make sense to confront the challenges facing the working class only in power-play in the workplace. Witness in this regard Karl von Holdt’s study of Highveld Steel, the 2000 strike at Volkswagen and the ongoing struggles at Rainbow Chicken. There has to be a turn to communities. An association with community movements, such as the much-vilified APF, would present great strategic options for Cosatu. It would allow both public and private sector trade unions,

in slightly different ways, to pursue the tactically sensible route in interest dispute resolution with their employer. At present private sector wage strikes deliver little above inflation. In places like the retail sector, employers have been on the offensive over the last few years actually securing a reduction in terms and conditions of employment, through a wage and benefit squeeze and mass casualisation (Kenny, 2003).

Secondary strikes are almost impossible to pull-off. I do not have time to go into the legal ins and outs of it at present, but strikes in the private sector are becoming increasingly difficult to conduct successfully. Labour law jurisprudence is awash with:-

1. appallingly easily granted strike interdicts which even if they are not confirmed so interfere in the interim with the exercise of power-play, that the strike is lost;

 

2. dismissals for minor misconduct during strikes;

 

3. chillingly punitive costs orders and at least two damages awards against unions for unprotected strike action;

 

4. ridiculously servile strike rules and expan- sive definitions of essential and maintenance services;

 

5. judgements that effectively render offensive lock-outs by employers unnecessary;

 

6. judgements that enable dismissals for the failure to agree to what are really mutual interest demands; and

 

7. restrictions placed on the idea of “secondary strikes” that disable intra and inter affiliate solidarity.

 

 

If you want to do better against an opponent several weight divisions ahead of you, you’ve got to bend the Queensbury rules; you’ve got to use your head

a bit, if you know what I mean.

 

Counter-punching

The political marginalisation of labour reflects a social marginalisation of work as a source of stability, identity and emancipatory visions for an expanding section of the working class. On the other hand, the everyday lives of working class communities are continuously affected by the detrimental impact of neoliberal economic policies on social reproduction.

Faced with these uncomfortable realities, popular responses to neoliberalism are forced to experiment with innovative methods. (Barchesi, 2004, 23).

As already indicated, Cosatu campaigns cannot be simply about wages and the workplace. The campaign needs to be linked to broader issues of redistribution and macro-economic policy-making. For example, Gill in her fascinating book, Disabling Globalisation (2002) found that workers in northern KZN labouring in Taiwanese owned factories were earning wages much higher than workers in similar

Taiwanese factories in mainland China. Of course, the immediate response would be to cut wages. But what Hart found was that the South African workers had much less buying power. This was because the Chinese workers had access to small plots of land and public transport. So the struggle cannot be just about wages. It has to be about land, which requires an alliance with the Landless People’s Movement (LPM), it requires a challenge to the policy of ‘willing buyer, willing seller ’ and the notion of building a large black commercial farming class. It also requires a struggle against privatisation of transport and the commodification of basic services. Surely, this is a more fruitful struggle to wage than the gimmicky Buy South African campaign?

So more practically, instead of attempting exclusively to extract value directly from employers on, at best, an industry by industry basis and at worst, site by site, in the form of annual, uncoordinated wage strikes, it would make sense to link the struggle for wage increases with a co- ordinated, huge annual income strike. In order to make sense of this, it is necessary briefly to look at the difference between the terms “wages” and “income” as I intend to use them here. “Wages” issue from an employer and flow, in remuneration and benefits, in recognition of work performed. For most blue-collar workers, wages are the cash they receive every fortnight coupled with medical aid contributions perhaps or an employer contribution to a pension scheme. Statutory deductions in lieu of UIF, although administered by the State, would also be included in the idea of wage.

“Income”, on the other hand, issues from government and is usually available to citizens as a whole. In dealing with “income”, the unit of analysis is no longer what the individual worker gets ex contractu, but what value or wealth the household gets in the form of social services, subsidies, pensions, grants or other welfare instruments. While the strictures of labour law make it hard to approach a recalcitrant boss for a raise in wages, protest action to obtain a raise from government is, if done properly, far easier. One of the reasons for this is that a boss does not rely on workers voting for him. Income struggles are also potentially more massive and can be co- ordinated in a manner maximally disruptive to society, not only one store or industry. Not only are the people employed at a particular factory activated, but grandparents, schoolchildren, the unemployed and workers wherever they work, are thrown into action. An income strike benefits the working members of a family because the pressure is taken off their wage to purchase the commodities necessary to sustain life for the month. There is literally more money in a workers’ pocket after a successful income strike.

And what sort of value can be added to the overall wealth of a family or community from income struggles? Well, recent reports put the average price of water and electricity services in townships at R120 per household per month. If the demand was for half of that to be subsidised by government, that would come down to the equivalent of a 3% wage increase for any worker in that house earning R2000 per month. The list of plausible income demands include:-

1. transport subsidies;
2. genuinely free education;
3. increase in pension;
4. BIG;
5. exemption from VAT of certain consumables;
6. free water and electricity;
7. free HIV/Aids medication; and
8. food coupons.

 

It would then fall to government to raise the funds for these measures; facing the test all governments should be facing: losing the next election or either raising taxes on the rich, cutting arms spending or properly dealing with corruption and waste.

In other words, one doesn’t only try to force extra wages out of your boss. One forces extra income from the state. It’s up to the ruling party to then tax the rich if it wants to, or else seriously deal with corruption and waste. Does it want to do any of these things?

These kinds of struggles would take place when public service struggles should take place, months before the annual budget is announced. Although public sector unions may argue that they already target government in their wage disputes, the problem is they do so at the wrong time and focus on the wrong minister. The budget and Trevor Manuel are the entities to apply pressure to, not Fraser-Moelikheid and various provincial ministers who must apportion an already fixed gross amount of money.

In struggling in tandem with the rhythm of the annual budget, one will avoid the bi-annual farce (and inevitable sell-out) of public sector strikes that are ultimately fought about the allocation of a fixed amount of money. In framing demands that include the broad working class, one will win the support for working class struggles of the majority of people in this country – the unemployed – millions of whom are former trade union members.

Legally speaking, it is a walk in the park compared with wage strikes. A proper income strike would take no more than a week for a result to be achieved. Since most of the people participating would not be losing wages during its persistence, it would make little sense for government to stall and hum and haw and hope for no-work-no-pay to moderate the demands put. Union members need not take part in the strike by staying away from work at all. The protest action that they are part of, during non-working hours, such as Sundays, or after work, or during maternity leave, even lunch time or, dare I say, annual leave – does not have to be processed via the debilitating and complicated mechanisms of the LRA. It is the far less restrictive Constitution and the Gatherings Act that would be at play. If the union wishes, for a few days, to officially join the strike, then the facility of section 77 of the LRA could be invoked, as long as this is planned well in advance, because it is a procedurally complex affair. But what we are talking about here is using the considerable union organisational muscle and resources to co-ordinate the pursuance of demands that affect more than just card-carrying union members.

 

Class fighters?

“People like to see miracles. People like to see underdogs that do it. People like to be there when history is made.” Muhammad Ali on the Rumble in the Jungle.

I can already hear some people arguing that this is an ultra-left plot to destroy the Alliance with the ruling party. Not so. I don’t believe Cosatu should leave the Alliance with the ANC. You’re far too weak to go it alone at this stage. Frankly what is called for is not a symbolic act like breaking the alliance, but a practical act in support of the ideas that historically underpinned that Alliance. There is nothing incompatible with an Alliance with the ANC in challenging local or national government to remain, in its social spending, true to the

Freedom Charter or RDP, if you like a more modern touchstone. Let them chuck you out if they don’t want popular participation in setting the budget, but you don’t have to go, in order to pursue this new orientation.

I suspect that you will not only provide leadership to your own members and to members of fledgling community movements, but also to many who would consider themselves ANC stalwarts. My firm belief is that many of these comrades are not sell-outs as much as they are caught up in a kind of strategic inertia. No one likes to start a fight that they feel they are not equipped to win. The leadership of the ANC and black and white business interests give the impression that they have everything sewn up. Legally and institutionally speaking, they’ve got any fight in this country rigged. But give the silent majority who are disgusted with the direction our liberation is taking just a sniff of blood, and you will bring out the class fighter in them again.

Desai is active in the social movements and is based in

Kwazulu-Natal.

 

References

Barchiesi, F (2004) ‘Classes, Multitudes and the Politics of Community Movements in Post-apartheid South Africa’, Centre for Civil Society Research Report No. 20.

 

COSATU (2000a) ‘Accelerating Social Transformation. COSATU’s Engagement with Policy and Legislative Processes during South Africa’s First Term of Democratic Governance’, The Shopsteward, 9, 3.

 

COSATU (2000b) Advancing Social Transformation in the Era of Globalisation, Political discussion document for the 7th National Congress.

 

COSATU (2004) Assessment of the past Fourteen Months since the Eight National Congress held in September 2004.

 

Kenny, B (2003) ‘Labour Market Flexibility in the Retail Sector: Possibilities for Resistance’ in Bramble, T and Barchiesi (eds), Rethinking the Labour Movement in the ‘New South Africa’ Ashgate Publishing, England

 

Hardt, M and Negri, A (2004) Multitude, The Penguin Press, New

York.

 

Von Holdt, K (2003) Transition from Below: Forging Trade Unionism and Workplace Change in South Africa, University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg.

 

Hart, G (2002) Disabling Globalisation: places of power in post-apartheid South Africa. University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, University of California Press, Berkley.