Cosatu’s response to the crisis and the challenges facing the SA working class

Ishmael Lesufi examines Cosatu’s response to the crisis and argues that the federation is setting up the South African working class for more defeats

The central question facing capitalist classes in the context of a crisis is how best to restore conditions for the production and realization of surplus value, and therefore profit. Given the fact that the production of surplus value is itself a process of struggle between the capitalist class and the working class, the critical question becomes which of the two classes will carry the burden for the resolution of the crisis. In the history of capitalist crisis, this question has been resolved by the balance of forces in the struggle between the two main social classes. The class that is both organizationally and politically stronger emerges victorious and shapes the resolution of the crisis to advance its own interests. It is in this context that we need to examine the response of Cosatu to the current crisis to gain an insight into how the balance of forces will shape up in the course of searching for solutions to the crisis in South Africa.

The outbreak of the global capitalist crisis takes place on the back of more than ten years of neoliberal offensive in South Africa. Cosatu’s response to the current crisis is consistent with how the federation responded to this offensive. In order to best understand how the federation is dealing with the current crisis, we therefore need to first analyse how it dealt with the neoliberal offensive and how its approach has impacted on the working class both economically and politically.

The neoliberal offensive and its effects on the working class in SA

The two prominent features that characterized Cosatu’s response to the more than ten years of neoliberal offensive in South Africa have been reliance on structures of class collaboration and the abandonment of militant traditions of mass mobilization to defend the interests of the working class. During this period the federation has been most active in structures like Nedlac and parliament. This preoccupation with seeking joint solutions with capital to the problems facing the working class has resulted in a series of defeats inflicted by the ruling class on the working class movement on almost all important issues that shaped the policy landscape of the new South Africa. The effects of these defeats in turn registered in the serious erosion of the living standards of the working class and its political fragmentation.

Key amongst some of the defeats suffered by the working class in the new South Africa are the following:

• The struggles around the new constitution with specific focus on the property rights, land ex- propriation and the lockout clauses;

• The struggles around the new LRA where the labour movement demanded amongst others the codification of the following in the law: the legal duty to bargain, centralized bargaining, unlimited right to strike, no use of scab labour during strike action and no recourse to lockout on the part of employers;

• Struggles around the BCEA where the labour movement demanded amongst others a 40-hour working week, 6 months paid maternity leave, ban on overtime and Sunday work and rejection of downward variation of basic conditions of employment;

• Struggles around the implementation of the GEAR macro-economic programme where the labour movement initially rejected the programme in its entirety.

In all these struggles the working class did not manage to win a single one of all the demands it put on the table. This series of defeats set the tone for the inability of the working class to defend its interests. While not denying the fact that the working class might have won a few demands, the important point is that those that were crucial in shaping power relations were won by the ruling class hands down. The defeats meant that the working class became the sole bearer of the cost of neoliberal restructuring. More than a million jobs were lost during the neoliberal offensive and the majority of the working class has since been thrown into part-time employment of one form or another, with the rest swelling the ranks of the informal sector and the unemployed. Levels of poverty and inequality have also been on the rise during this period. The combined effect of the defeats and the fall in living standards has been the political fragmentation of the working class.

This fragmentation is expressed at two levels. There is the separation between the employed sections of the working class from the rest of the class. The employed working class concentrates its energies on factory floor issues while the unemployed working class takes up broader issues of social services delivery outside the factory gates. There is also the fragmentation within the employed working class itself. This takes the form of separation between the core workers who are permanently employed and enjoy relatively better working conditions and those in non-permanent positions of various forms including part-time, casuals, flexi-time etc. The core workers are mostly unionized but have failed to develop effective strategies of organizing the non-core workers to build unity and a common front against the employers.

The state of the working class movement on the eve of the outbreak of the global capitalist crisis is characterized by the following features accumulated during the neoliberal offensive: a fall in living standards, political fragmentation, retreat from militant struggles and a Cosatu leadership committed to methods of struggle that contributed to the political and organizational weaknesses of the working class. The only exceptions are the anti- neoliberal struggles led by social movements in communities around the country, even though such struggles remain isolated and uneven in terms of their quality.

The Global capitalist crisis and Cosatu’s response

The federation has responded to the crisis at three levels: putting its faith in the new ANC leadership, resorting to failed methods of class collaboration and sticking to narrow collective bargaining issues.

The new ANC leadership

In spite of the resolutions adopted at the ANC Polokwane conference and the presence of the supposedly worker friendly leadership, what is becoming clear is that the ANC in government has no intentions of implementing any of those resolutions, especially those that relate to the immediate interests of the poor. The amount of energy being invested in the pursuit of resolutions on decent work, free education and child support grant up to age 18 is no way close to that put on implementing the resolution on the dissolution of the Scorpions. What is also clear is that the neoliberal policies of the government will not change and despite the rhetoric, the Cosatu leadership has no interest in taking up struggles around this. In fact the federation is trying by all means to avoid a confrontation with the ANC. This explains its frantic efforts to terminate the current doctors’ strike and normalize the situation in the public service.

The Numsa march to the Reserve Bank is testimony to the role played by unions in the retreat of the working class in South Africa. Firstly, the march was conducted on a narrow trade union platform without a single call to other sections of the working class to join in struggle. No attempt to link this struggle with the struggles of other sections of the working class around service delivery was made. The union failed to act as a pole around which all the isolated struggles of the working class could gravitate. This is a graphic illustration of the depth of the retreat of the working class movement given the role played by the union in the history of working class struggles in the country. Numsa played an important part in shaping the militant struggles that marked the early days of Cosatu and also made enormous contributions to building community structures that bridged the divide between workplace and community struggles. None of these traditions were visible in the way the union approached its programme around the crisis. Secondly, the choice of the issue around which to wage struggles around the effects of the crisis is itself reflective of the union’s orientation towards the privileged sections of the working class. After all it is only workers who are servicing bonds and HP accounts that will have an immediate interest in struggling for low interest rates. Under conditions of crisis, the rest of the working class is interested in preventing further job losses, securing conditions of employment and improving living standards.

The framework agreement on the global capitalist crisis

The federation has also put its faith in the framework agreement that was entered into with capital and the state as a specific response to the crisis. The agreement is notable for its vague language around the sources of the current crisis but very clear in assigning the leading role to capital in the resolution of the crisis. Contrary to a global retreat from the prescripts of the neoliberal gospel in which even the bourgeoisie is growing skeptical about the appropriateness of neoliberal policies, the agreement singles out the neoliberal policies of the ANC government as the reason why the country is not adversely affected by the global crisis. By joining hands with capital and the state in this agreement, Cosatu has given a stamp of approval to neoliberal policies. Even occasional calls for nationalization and regulatory measures ring hollow given the fact that the ruling class can also be heard making similar calls.

Accordingly, the agreement calls for a number of measures that respect the sanctity of the central pillars of neoliberalism. For example, fiscal and monetary policies are not subject to change. On monetary policy the agreement commits to the independence of the Reserve Bank in carrying out its fight against inflation. On fiscal policy, it only makes a vague call for counter-cyclical measures that should be sustainable over the long run [read: fiscal discipline]. On important matters like retrenchments the agreement calls for the facilitation of the CCMA. We all know what this means in the context of huge unemployment and an LRA that disarms the working class when coming to engaging in strike action over lay-offs. In fact as the parties were busy negotiating the agreement, thousands of jobs were being lost. On other crucial issues like outsourcing and the use of labour brokers, all it could offer is a commitment to have Nedlac discuss the matters urgently.

Collective bargaining and the crisis

The 2009 collective bargaining season opens in the middle of an unfolding crisis that threatens the acceleration of the fall in the living standards of the working class. Instead of using the bargaining process as a rallying point for the working class to organise in defense of its living standards and rebuild its political and fighting capacities, the federation adopted a business as usual approach and stuck to its traditional approach of narrow factory and industry based bargaining.

Such a narrow focus on traditional collective bargaining issues is clearly inadequate in the context of a generalised assault on living standards. The impact of the crisis will also shape the balance of forces in the bargaining process as estimates are that this year alone the economy will shed half a million jobs. This will further weaken the bargaining power of labour as unions will be forced to consider job retention instead of improving existing conditions of work. This is compounded by the fact that the LRA only allows factories with large numbers of workers to strike over retrenchments.

The labour movement has not been able to consistently secure above inflation wage increases and as a matter of fact, real wages have been on a steep decline. This means the ability of the unions to uplift the living conditions of their members and the entire working class has waned. As a result, possibilities of raising living standards of the working class through collective bargaining are seriously limited. In this environment, it becomes absolutely necessary for the unions to integrate their bargaining activities with the struggles and campaigns waged by social movements and community based organizations against neoliberalism. An effective approach to defending Retrenched Miners inside a bus as they leave a Harmony goldmine in Welkom, South Africa. The living standards of the working class requires that effective strategies to link and coordinate the struggles waged by poor communities, students, casual workers, the rural poor and those in the informal sector be urgently developed. 

Concluding remarks

As indicated at the beginning of this article, the key issue at the centre of this capitalist crisis is which class will pay for the restoration of the conditions of stable accumulation and rising profits. We also indicated that answers to this issue do not arise from conferences and deliberations, but are rather forged in the crucible of the class struggle and that for a class to emerge victorious in these battles, it needs to be politically and organizationally strong.

The global capitalist crisis breaks out at the time when the working class is still licking the wounds suffered during the defeats of the neoliberal offensive. The outbreak of the crisis takes place at a time when the organizations of the working class are at their weakest. With the exception of isolated struggles waged by social movements and community based organizations around social services delivery, the levels of demoralization have seen the self-activity of the working class at its lowest ever. This is a period in which the political fragmentation of the working class has led to an absence of a unifying political vision around which to integrate and coordinate struggles against neoliberalism. The fact that the working class has not launched a counter offensive in spite of the generalized attack on its living standards is testimony to the depth of the political and organizational weaknesses.

All these weaknesses within the working class have their common source in the strategies and methods of struggle adopted by the leadership of Cosatu in the post 1994 period. Throughout this period the leadership of the federation has been the common denominator in the political and organizational weaknesses of the working class. The federation has completely broken with the socialist politics and the militant traditions of struggles that shaped its early days. With its current politics, the federation is setting the South African working class up for more catastrophic defeats.

Given a working class that is on the retreat both economically and politically, the defense of its immediate interests becomes critical as an act of self-preservation. The new social movements, with all their political and organizational weaknesses on account of their relatively short period of existence, seem the only likely anchors for such defensive struggles against neoliberalism. Although it will not be an easy and quick process, the struggles waged by these movements will overtime serve as a platform for the renewal of the working class movement.