The Unions of South Africa

...On the other hand, if COSATU becomes in any sense isolated from other social forces in the African communities, will it remain as relatively immune to undercutting from the desperate and vast reserve army of labor that potentially exists outside its organizational ranks...

...Partly the creation of state policy, these categories represent a strong cultural reality molded from below as well...

...The "populists," who wanted to propagandize enthusiastically for the ANC, the SACP (South African Communist party), and their armed struggle, feared a dampening of revolutionary impulse and varied in their commitment to practical organization and the construction of effective autonomous unions...

...FOSATU politics of the 1979-85 period is often described as "workerism...

...On the whole, it is the FOSATU style that has triumphed and FOSATU ideas that have gradually surfaced as the more important ones (although the influence of certain smaller unions from the independent 1970s mold can also be pinpointed...

...The differences are now less important...

...A few white TUCSA union officials provided valuable organizational skills and know-how to newly stirring workers and worker-leaders...

...It had no answer to the new spirit of resistance...

...Formed as a federation in 1985 from a variety of so-called emergent or democratic unions, it is now the major South African trade union federation and works in alliance with the SACP and the ANC...

...SUMMER • 1992 • 385...

...Another perspective, particularly associated with the SACTWU (South African Clothing and Textile Workers' Union), also incidentally thinking in terms of the weaknesses of the ANC, assumes that an ANC or partially ANC government cannot be trusted to represent the organized workers to any great extent...

...The federation has swung its weight in key disputes around industrial unity when partisan factions have divided unions, convincingly showing the bias toward strengthening organization as a priority over favoring one particular political line above another...

...Partly, they are contextual...

...To this labor militancy the independence movements owed a great deal...

...So far the Tripartite Alliance has been a key factor in building some common purpose in a floundering, disorganized ANC, but it is not very clear what the union movement has received in return...

...There is a far smaller federation, NACTU (National Council GLOSSARY African National Congress (ANC...

...South Africa is far more industrialized than other African countries...

...COSATU has little definite organizational hold and few financial resources apart from what is vested in its stronger affiliates...

...National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA...

...Botha in 1979...

...Perhaps this has been promoted by the extent to which COSATU has embraced ANC-SACP politics...

...Probably the most interesting question to ask about the South African trade unions is whether or not this is the pattern they will follow— incorporation and decline—as apartheid structures crumble and those in African politics begin to reach out for at least partial access to power in the 1990s...

...There are many potential weaknesses in the trade-union movement that come up in discussions among those who are trying to assess its future potential...

...Alliances and Challenges COSATU unions have lent their impressive organizational skills toward the construction of a so-called Tripartite Alliance with the ANC and the Communist party...

...Thus the American- and German-dominated car industry of the eastern Cape, originally founded in the 1920s with a lily-white work force, was expanding forty years later on the basis of Colored and then African assembly line workers, who came to political life soon enough...

...It practices ethnic mobilization and has opposed revolutionary social and economic strategies for change...

...However, there are also important countervailing tendencies that give the workers a chance...

...Although the unions are slowly acquiring a competent and efficient bureaucratic structure, increasingly essential in response to their own successes in shop-floor struggles, one wonders if the gap between layers in the union will not widen in consequence...

...Actually, many of the organized African workers of the late 1970s and early 1980s were rural migrants with little education, but some, including key cadres, were young men with a record of schoolboy defiance and resistance...

...There are many independent unions, particularly organizing white, Colored, and Asian workers, that are "apolitical," sometimes more or less sweetheart unions but in other cases reasonably well run and effective...

...Formed in 1990 but based on the Inkatha so-called cultural movement launched in 1975, it is the dominant political force in the Kwa Zulu "homeland" and among many migrant workers from there...

...There is certainly the possibility of such a pattern in the attitude of politicians inside and out of the African National Congress (ANC...

...Before 1979, it was in fact illegal for African workers to strike, and a multitude of barriers had been put up against their permanent residence in the white city...

...It was weak in strategically key industries such as metals and unable to challenge the system very effectively...

...Apartheid conceptualized the African urban worker as a sojourner in town although in reality practical compromises had led in contradictory fashion to a massive expansion of townships aimed at the settlement of African families on the urban periphery...

...The COSATU affiliates have a very uneven strength...

...Johann Maree, ed., The Independent Trade Unions 1974-84: Ten Years of the South African Labour Bulletin (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987...

...Colored and Asian...

...Those belonging to these categories suffered discrimination but always had the right to move without passes and to belong to trade unions and to strike...

...At the level of national politics, COSATU officials proceed often without the kind of grass-roots mandate that typifies their industrial practices, but there is no reason to doubt that the majority of their workers favor the alliance...

...For the sake of convenience, the conventional South African racial categories—white, African, Colored, and Asian—will be used throughout...

...The state-controlled unions lost any vigor or vitality...

...These new recruits may be interested in COSATU effectiveness in terms of shop-floor bargaining, but they are not necessarily comfortable with the style or the content of COSATU politics...

...Finally, this new breed of organizers was to some degree able to join forces with older African workers who were SACTU survivors...

...Buthelezi to try and establish a basis for peace where thousands have died in bitter feuds that have partially been caused by the antagonism between the ANC and Inkatha...

...One was simply the rapid development of an urban African population, cut off from rural roots by apartheid influx 380 • DISSENT The Unions of South Africa control, with its burgeoning demands for the satisfaction of basic needs, growing intolerance of the racist and paternalistic order in the work place, and gradually increasing skill and literacy levels...

...Pan-African Congress (PAC...

...Their capacity for self-defense and for broadcasting a wider vision of economic and social transformation so far greatly exceeds that of the ANC, let alone its rivals...

...In writing about the trade-union movement, I will mostly be considering COSATU, a federation created in 1985...

...Namibia is only the latest in a long list of countries that exemplify this pattern...

...Foreigners may be less inclined to supply COSATU with funding if the burning apartheid issue is considered closed...

...Populists and Workerists...

...However, once in power the nationalists, particularly the more ideologically ambitious from Nkrumah onward, subverted and destroyed independent working-class activity...

...If a new baby is being born in South Africa, COSATU is determined to be one of the parents...

...Will that potential be harnessed to create a new sort of society in South Africa or will it gradually be marginalized as a moderate ANC moves toward the political center and seeks to dominate political life in the African townships and other settlements...

...Nonetheless, concentrating on COSATU seems the right way to go about a brief evaluation of the significance of the South African trade union movement today...

...Trade unions could organize Africans, but such organizations could not cross the color line nor could they achieve any official recognition...

...in N. Nattrass and E. Ardington, eds., The Political Economy of South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1990), 148-63...

...This tendency also talks in terms of forging a social contract but assumes the continued and permanent existence of strong, autonomous capitalists...

...The name reveals two specific sources of origin: the so-called independent or emergent or nonracial unions that federated into the FOSATU (Federation of South African Trade Unions) grouping in 1979 and the historic linkage to the Congress tradition, associated with the African National Congress, the South African Communist party, and the South African Congress of Trade Unions, which existed almost entirely in exile from the early 1960s to 1990...

...It represented a significant new set of constraints on the freedom unions had won since 1979, making the declaration of a legal strike more difficult, allowing firms to claim damages from unions over illegal strikes, reducing the power of industrial courts, and changing the definition of unfair labor practices...

...It admitted non-Africans to membership in 1969 and to leadership positions in 1985...

...There is clearly a potential for COSATU to form the basis of a rival socialist movement, but that potential is only discussed in the corridors and in private...

...Up to the early 1980s, COSATU predecessors made excellent use of the openings available through state reform legislation and through the need for multinationals to justify their presence in South Africa faced with a buildup in international boycott pressure...

...Since 1988 or 1989, much of the growth in COSATU has come from workers who are not part of their classic sociological profile— Coloreds and Indians (of whom many or most according to current opinion polls support State President de Klerk), far more white-collar workers including teachers, and increasing numbers of women...

...Based on an ideology of Africanism, it broke away from the ANC in 1959 and was effectively illegal from 1960 to 1990...

...Business in South Africa is obsessed with the problem of low productivity, largely blamed on the work force...

...FOSATU decided to accept the logic of Wiehahn and convincingly turned its back on the historic legacy of rejectionism, accepting state registration as a valuable and useful' tactic that would advance the terrain of struggle...

...A federation that existed between 1979 and 1985 that formed an important component in and influence on COSATU, which replaced it...

...A democratic government will have to reckon with powerful and well-entrenched institutions in many walks of life and millions of non-Africans who would not accept incorporation into a new one-party system...

...If the ANC comes to power, it will do so from a relatively weak position with limited capacity for institutional transformation...

...Some of these militants then came into the work force with a new spirit of defiance and a thirst for organization...

...In this historical context, unions (or better, labor militancy more generally) played a big role and were enormously successful, given the slight weight of secondary industry in underdeveloped extractive economies...

...A key to understanding this process is the relationship between organized workers and the rest of the black population...

...On the one hand, there is a half-forgotten tradition of white militancy with strong British roots, a militancy that powered a number of huge strikes between 1907 and 1922, overwhelmingly steered in the direction of protecting the situation of a minority of the work force against being drowned by the weight of unskilled cheap labor...

...There is a potentially militant but so far ineffective racist white trade union movement crosscutting industrial lines, which sometimes promotes itself as the white COSATU...

...Few take seriously the old SACP idea of a two-stage revolution whereby a populist struggle for "national democracy" should be uncritically supported first while hoping at some distant future date that a socialist utopia will emerge...

...Steven Friedman, Building Tomorrow Today: African Workers in Trade Unions 1970-84 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987...

...The intention was to create a peaceful and apolitical outlet that would prevent industrial and political dissension from coming together...

...It is the main pillar of organized support for the ANC, and as 378 • DISSENT The Unions of South Africa such will have a major impact on national negotiations and the transition to democracy...

...As a result, civil society may prove to be far more complex and far more resilient than elsewhere in Africa, allowing the labor movement considerable scope...

...This perspective often embodies the hope that the SACP can be won over or transformed to the cause of a radicalized ANC...

...I=1 Bibliographical Note This article has made use of Karl von Holdt, "COSATU Congress: Elections, Voting, New Blocs—What Does It All Mean...

...all provided skills lacking in the poorly educated African masses...

...One perspective that can be identified from current COSATU discourse poses the main challenge as a struggle to win hegemony within the ANC against middle-class elements that will settle for a relatively conservative deal with white power structures that will benefit largely themselves...

...Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU...

...In effect, this is the process that fuels the "expanded reproduction" of organizational strength...

...In this regard COSATU has remained relatively faithful to a congress perspective and thus still satisfies the pre-COSATU "populists...

...Several elements were important in the new unionism, whose beginnings are usually linked to the massive, unorganized strike waves in the docks (1972) and then the factories (1973) of the port city of Durban, where industry had grown at a particularly fast clip...

...Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU...

...This alliance operates in particular vis-a-vis negotiations with the National party government, which are now underway...

...Decisions, once accepted by a majority, are tightly enforced on all as binding mandates...

...Militancy in the 1970s The 1970s started with a revival of militancy mostly grouped around so-called black consciousness ideas that attracted intellectuals, but from 1976 to 1977, the rapidly growing number of students in new poor-quality high schools in African townships became the core of a resistance movement that rocked the South African state...

...Over three years, COSATU led the fight, first with business and then directly with the state, against the promulgation of the act and eventually secured crucial modifications that very substantially reduced the limits it tried to impose on union power...

...It is, by implication at least, frankly SUMMER • 1992 • 383 The Unions of South Africa hostile to the SACP...

...However, after this very difficult phase, a major renewal took place, a renewal that has gone from strength to strength with few major setbacks...

...In the 1940s in the midst of the rapid expansion of secondary industry in South Africa, a whole range of these tendencies was represented in the South African Trades and Labor Council...

...However, it would be inaccurate to equate COSATU with the unions...

...Currently it is impossible to predict where future power struggles will lead in this area...

...It remains a significant player in black South African politics...

...If it is not possible to have a working-class politics inside or outside the ANC, the main thrust must be to empower the union movement through entrenching its autonomy constitutionally and even in alliance with the employers...

...An important COSATU affiliate, which was a foundermember in 1985...

...COSATU has, for instance, been crucial in talks with the Inkatha Freedom party of M.G...

...A postapartheid government may prefer to emphasize the spread of low-wage jobs to South Africa's millions of unemployed poor...

...A major affiliate of COSATU launched in its present form in 1987...

...Much of this is due to the congruence of that style with a dense and remarkably effective organizational thrust...

...S A Labour Bulletin, XVI:1 (July-August 1991), 12-23, and Devan Pillay and Eddie Websterl, "COSATU, the Party and the Future State," Work in Progress, 76 (August 1991), 31-37...

...Founded in 1912, illegal from 1960 to 1990, it has gone through many changes but generally has been the premier African political movement...

...SACTU propaganda was still insisting that it was impossible for unions to function effectively and honestly in "fascist" South Africa and sometimes succeeded in blocking FOSATU attempts at building international links...

...National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa (NUM...

...In 1987, a new Labor Relations Act was drafted, largely at the instigation of business...

...It also included others who loved that tradition but sought to transform it into a more socialist and class-based one, so that workers would not just endorse replacing white bosses with black ones...

...The legitimation of an ANC government may herald a delegitimation of union struggles...

...A section of the numerous new unions being established came together into a tight federation, FOSATU...

...South African Clothing and Textile Workers Union (SACTWU...

...Once again it confounded skeptics with its creativity and effectiveness...

...Mike Morris, "Unions and Industrial Councils: Why do Unions' Policies Change...

...The state moved to entrench by steps the stabilization of township life and to legalize African trade unionism...

...For more on the South African unions, especially recommended are Jeremy Baskin, Striking Back: A History of COSATU (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1991...

...To what extent will conservative forces entrench themselves socially, economically, and constitutionally in the negotiation period out of apartheid, which is now going to be a major factor...

...The remarkable history of the South African labor movement, however, suggests that it may well be able to 384 • DISSENT The Unions of South Africa maneuver within this set of circumstances, which will at least allow it to avoid oblivion and may give it a unique role in the reshaping of South African society...

...Organizing Struggles The history of trade unionism in South Africa is organizationally very complicated...

...Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP...

...The dearth of women in leadership positions, despite their forming 36 percent of the membership according to a recent publication, is embarrassing...

...Organized workers have consistently been able to beat inflation year in and year out in their wage hikes, and conditions have 382 • DISSENT The Unions of South Africa continued to improve despite the disastrously stagnant nature of the economy...

...A major affiliate of COSATU formed in 1989...

...Eventually many Indian and Colored workers, almost as numerous a part of the South African working class taken together as the whites, were also signed up in such unions...

...The original diverse union structure has been largely remodeled in favor of a far smaller number of remolded, enlarged, industrially based, and centralized unions...

...In the first years after federation, intense political differences created chasms among the principal unions...

...Particularly those with one form or another of "workerism" in their background have retained much organizational dynamism, but some others are suffering from quite serious dislocations and dissension, often because the energies that once propelled them have shifted into other political directions...

...The title of the best account of the pre-COSATU rise of labor, Steven Friedman's Building Tomorrow Today, succinctly captures the prefigurative socialist element that has inspired such union thinking...

...it has long since been channeled into a trade unionism dependent on state regulation and patronage...

...COSATU has succeeded several times in calling huge general strikes for up to three days...

...The Trade Union Council of South Africa (TUCSA), SACTU's rival, had shifted its position on racial integration several times, but the very needs of white workers demanded incorporation of larger numbers of workers of all colors...

...Yet most powerful business figures, beyond the desire for labor peace, are completely uninterested in a social contract that would involve a significant shift in economic power or give organized workers a major say in economic planning...

...COSATU is probably promoting the most advanced thinking in the country on the problems and opportunities posed by so-called post-Fordist flexible production models and the requisite transformation of the labor force in terms of skills and perspectives to meet that challenge...

...It may also be beholden to the support or tolerance of business—national and international—which is extremely eager for a reassertion of shop-floor power...

...It reflected the growing tendency in the business establishment, no longer able to count on effortless boom-year conditions and increasingly interested in the question of productivity, to accept that industrial relations in South Africa needed to change...

...Legally constituted racial categories under apartheid...

...A second was the related presence within the conservative trade union movement of increasing numbers of dissatisfied, potentially militant nonwhite workers incorporated into so-called parallel branches or organizations...

...Always dominated by white craft workers and working within the existing legal framework, it dissolved at the end of 1986...

...Worker organization was at a low point in the 1960s, a decade when the apartheid system was at its peak of effectiveness and vigor while the economy boomed...

...The most successful COSATU unions have a powerful shop-steward structure and a form of union democracy that has welded officials and members together effectively and has generally avoided disastrous defeats on the industrial front...

...It is a key player in drafting labour legislation and in restructuring the National Manpower Commission...

...Critics have counter-claimed that such a project privileged national politics over worker organization, neglected possibilities outside the conspiratorial world of the underground, and ultimately orphaned the African workers, leaving them leaderless...

...However, the particular history and strengths of the unions will also play a very important role...

...q SUMMER • 1992 • 379 The Unions of South Africa of Trade Unions), which organizes one hundred thousand plus workers and is sympathetic to the Pan-African Congress...

...It is beginning to negotiate on economic issues with the state and employers...

...The pass system, cornerstone of influx control, was abolished in 1986...

...The international context will inevitably determine the prospects for the economy or the limits to those prospects...

...The moderate grouping that emerged from the 1955 split that also created SACTU...

...A trade-union federation formed in 1955 when the extant Trades and Labor Council split...

...As the unions expand and times change, ordinary African members become detached from the debates that dominate the center and from the layers of militant and dedicated shop stewards who played such a role in the past...

...Trade Union Council of South Africa (TUCSA...

...These successes changed the nature of the workplace in enhancing dignified treatment for workers on such issues as arbitrary dismissals, in eliminating the most obvious forms of racism, in regularizing the way employees were treated...

...Support for workers has tended to undermine the potential of a massive unemployed population from simply moving in as scabs during strikes...

...in six years this total has tripled...

...In practice, "workerism" covered a number of different tendencies...

...Even failed strikes, such as the huge 1987 miners' strike, did not lead to the collapse or the derecognition of the union...

...Apartheid terminology for the regulations attempting to control the access of African people to jobs and residence in "white South Africa...

...That militancy never built powerful, long-lasting unions...

...A process organically linking struggle and negotiation has become second nature...

...South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU...

...Splits among officials and politicians linked to the ruling National party led to the ouster of the Vorster government in the wake of the so-called "Muldergate" scandal and the turn toward reform under P.W...

...Education programs have been underdeveloped in part due to political standoffs over their content, and this has added to the problem...

...Wiehahn Commission...

...Based on this system of democratic control, which operates at its best with regard to workplace issues, there is a high level of solidarity and loyalty...

...The entrants into COSATU who saw the unions primarily as political vanguards that simply aimed at mobilizing to help promote ANC-SACP politics have gradually been marginalized, in good part because they were so much less serious about building solid unions...

...The drain of African leadership from the unions has already begun, with Cyril Ramaphosa and Sydney Mafumadi of the Congress of South African Trade Unions' (COSATU) executive shifting their careers following election to top ANC office at the conference in Durban last year...

...This tendency, particularly notable in NUMSA, the union of metal and auto workers, aspires to harness a mixed economy in the interests of a socialist project that has not been discredited in South Africa despite defeats elsewhere in the world and counts on the union movement to play a central political role...

...From the early 1980s, particularly in capitalintensive industries such as chemicals and automobiles, major gains were also made on wages...

...Banned from 1950 to 1990 but reconstituted secretly after self-dissolution in the mid-fifties, it has since operated in close alliance with the ANC, and its membership consists virtually entirely of ANC members...

...The key workers were postal, dockworkers, and even teachers and those in such sectors as the railways and plantations...

...As the white-dominated Labor party (Smuts's very junior wartime partner) moved leftward and rejected apartheid, it lost almost all support from the white electorate...

...The unity of the council buckled and finally broke under the pressure of a hostile racist state, a fearful and protectionist white working class moving one way, and an increasingly militant African urban working class going the other...

...SACTU was nonracial but largely African in membership...

...There is a growing understanding of the need for a historical sea change that will shift the economy from an easy dependence on the cornucopia of mineral wealth to one that can export industrial commodities competitively...

...Workers feel in control at meetings and congresses and have prevented officials from taking advantage of their skills and positions...

...Strongly communist-influenced, allied to the ANC, and successful in attracting African members, it was effectively crippled and destroyed through repression aft& 1960 and functioned thereafter mostly in exile...

...Very quickly, unions overcame state strictures about organizing workers of different races and about organizing migrants along with resident urban workers...

...Even the populists realized some years ago that COSATU organization offered the possibility of a disciplined, structured response to a complex power system quite outside the political experience of the African population otherwise...

...The illegal Communist party, which saw the future mostly in terms of piggybacking upon a militant African nationalism, was dominant in SACTU...

...At best, the last two years have seen not only the ANC but the SACP as well increasingly unequivocally support the idea of long-term trade union independence...

...Workerists" included those who SUMMER • 1992 • 381 The Unions of South Africa disliked the ANC tradition, which they identified with Communist manipulation, populist demagoguery, and lack of genuine commitment to worker issues...

...Political and strategic differences coupled with the petty ambitions found in any organization stood in the way...

...Constituted in 1977 after the urban uprisings of the previous year and reporting in 1979, this key commission recommended legalizing African trade unionism, a recommendation the state accepted...

...Other unions, some still operating under the SACTU shadow, at first opposed this, but ultimately FOSATU was proven correct through its organizational successes...

...Later they were joined by idealistic Indian and Colored university and high-school products as well...

...In 1985, there were approximately 400,000 members...

...SACTU defenders have claimed that this federation evolved a distinctive kind of "political unionism...

...COSATU leaders who think this way imagine that there may be the possibility for the union movement to take the lead in economic reorientation and institutional restructuring—in effect, a working-class takeover of the liberation movement...

...There are, however, still plenty of union politicians interested in socialism who are deeply committed to the ANC...

...Above all, it characterized the sensible and cautious who simply wanted to concentrate on building very tight, effective organizations at factory and branch level until some unassigned future date...

...It took four years to negotiate a new larger federation that embraced a wide range of the existing, expanding unions...

...On the other hand were waves of organization and labor resistance going back to the years after World War I on the part of a growing African working class—waves that surged forth in a variety of organizational forms but failed to solidify into the enduring basis of a movement until recently...

...This intention was entirely frustrated, for the action of the Wiehahn Commission in legalizing African unions opened Pandora's box...

...Influx Control...

...According to a current assessment by the editor of the S A Labour Bulletin: The non-racial trade union movement, with COSATU at its centre, is now a more influential social force than it has ever been...

...A basic assessment about the tradeunion movement in Africa would go something like the following: the emergence of postwar nationalist movements coincided with economic expansion and enormous pressure on the living standards of the rising number of African workers...

...The remarkable thing has been the gradually increasing coherence of the federation despite the initial differences...

...With economic stagnation and decline in independent Africa, although some worker organizations reassert their freedom and play a key role in periods of political change (as in Zambia today), neither the state nor the unions are in a position to improve significantly the lives of wage workers or the far larger numbers of newly urbanized and impoverished men and women...

...Terms used, somewhat pejoratively, to describe tendencies in the union movement in the 1980s...

...South African Communist Party (SACP...

...The left end of the Council regrouped to form the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) in 1955...

...Unions outside FOSATU often rejected "workerism" as well as registration...

...A third factor was the availability of a key layer of young white graduates, alienated by the black consciousness movement from their African confreres and often full of new ideas associated with Western Marxism and the New Left in England and elsewhere, who threw themselves into the unions and formed an invaluable layer of cadres...