Conflicts inside South Africa’s most prominent trade union federation, COSATU, have grown more acute in recent months. Its leadership finds itself trapped in faction fights, fuelled by self-seeking bureaucrats desperate to cling to or capture more perks rather than advance the democratic demands and aspirations of workers. Political big shots have thus far failed to resolve the public spats and bitter infighting in the COSATU leadership, including its bigger and influential affiliates. Some unions have already split and the breakaway unions are determined to recruit workers within the same industries and workplaces where rival unions are well entrenched.
These troubles engulfing the trade unions took centre stage at the 2014 end-of-year General Council meeting of the Democratic Left Front (DLF) in Cape Town. The Western Cape Steering Committee invited a panel of union leaders to discuss what is happening in the trade unions with an audience of 50-odd activists from DLF affiliates. Speakers included dissidents in COSATU-affiliated unions sharing the stage with leaders from two Western Cape based unions that are not affiliates of any trade union federation.
A National Executive Committee (NEC) member addressed the gathering on behalf of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA). Before delving into the essence of his main political message, which ignited sharp exchanges during the open discussion, this NUMSA official fleetingly reminded the DLF activist assembly of the resolutions adopted at the 2013 NUMSA Special Congress. Without sober reflections on these resolutions, the speaker reasoned, the war-talk between NUMSA and the COSATU Central Executive Committee will be incomprehensible to the uninformed.
Against the backdrop of the Special Congress resolutions, our NUMSA office bearer then leaped into a defence of NUMSA’s call for and envisaged role in the United Front. He argued that NUMSA will facilitate rather than dictate the actual formation of the united front. Leaders in NUMSA believe that a united front leadership will arise ‘from below’ instead of the union imposing a blueprint about the content and constituent forces making up the united front.
In NUMSA’s view, the united front is simply about finding synergies between or uniting community and workplace struggles. But as participants in the assembly challenged this oversimplification of united fronts, our union leader was quick to concede that trade unions cannot lead a socialist revolution but then kept silent on what kind of organization workers need for this historic task. In his self-defence, he just echoed the hollow cliché that too much theorisation about the united front is counterproductive.
Factional strife also runs deep in other COSATU affiliates, like the public sector unions for municipal workers and teachers. A litany of scandals appears to be fomenting these feuds. Allegations of corruption, financial mismanagement and authoritarian suspensions top the list. Speakers representing dissident factions in SAMWU and SADTU revisited the histories of their divided unions before updating the assembly on the course of their bitter opposition to the entrenched bureaucracies in these unions. Interestingly, both dissident groups initially appealed to the constitutions of their unions in their protracted campaigns for democracy inside their unions.
The “Save Our SAMWU” (SOS) representative spoke of an unbridgeable gulf between the leaders and rank-and-file in SAMWU and the disappearance of workers control over the affairs of this elementary organisation of municipal workers. The SOS campaign has invested a lot of its energy in pursuing charges against the SAMWU bureaucrats in the high court. But how does this type of courtroom tussle mobilise the rank-and-file to bring the union under workers’ control? The SOS speaker never answered this question.
Unlike the dissidents clustered around the SOS campaign, those suspended from SADTU argued that they had exhausted the judicial route to democracy in their union. Indeed, indefinite court battles can demoralize a union’s rank-and-file members who in these instances become distant spectators. This faction has thus taken the decisive step to break from SADTU and begin the groundwork for a new union, known as USAWE (Union of South African Workers in Education).
Spokespersons from the two independent unions told the gathering of victories and setbacks in their struggles to defend the economic interests of their members. This is the traditional terrain of trade union resistance albeit narrow from an anti-capitalist political perspective. With its members recruited mainly from electrical, chemical and construction workers in Cape Town, the panelist from a general workers’ union also highlighted the participation of their shop-stewards in various community protests.
The general secretary of CSAAWU riveted the attention of the assembly to the aftermath of the 2012 farmworkers rebellion which had its epicentre on export-oriented farms in the Western Cape Province, close to the Cape Metropole. A key gain from this strike has been the 60% hike in the minimum wage floor for farmworkers. But government’s employment commission found that even after this increase, the average farmworker family still falls short of what it needs to make ends meet, let alone enjoy a decent living. Farmers have stepped up their campaign to not pay this new minimum wage – exploiting loopholes in the minimum wage regulations for agricultural workers. From the start of the strike, the speaker stressed, the enemies of farmworkers strategised to break the strike and destroy the self-confidence of the workers. Strike leaders were hunted down and imprisoned. Dismissals and evictions of farmworkers from farms increased sharply. CSAAWU evidently became a prime target and victim in this merciless assault on farmworkers. Court cases to defend workers have bankrupted the union financially and saddled it with a debt burden that threatens the survival of the union.
This DLF panel discussion has thrown the spotlight on the crisis facing South Africa’s trade union movement today. It also confronts workers with finding a genuine anti-capitalist path out of this crisis instead of placing hopes in the bankrupt politics of “Socialism from Below” or the “National Democratic Revolution”.