LAST May colleagues went to Rustenburg to gain insight into the Impala strike and to assess the organisational and political ramifications of the fallout between the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and its rank and file.
One of the people we met was a member of the independent workers’ committee known as the Five Madoda. Comrade Bob* was a militant who, with thousands of other Impala workers, had decided to break with NUM and join the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu). Bob told us that most workers no longer wanted anything to do with the ANC and the SACP.
Their next strategy was to eject NUM shaft stewards from their offices on mine premises and to install their own leaders operating under Amcu.
It’s a year since the visit and much has happened. NUM has continued to lose members. But it’s the fateful events at Lonmin’s Marikana mine in August that have dominated news.
The wildcat strike by Amcu-affiliated Lonmin workers this week is a reminder that issues at the mine, in the platinum belt and the mining industry as a whole, are far from resolved. To be sure, there are layers to the Marikana story and it would be simplistic to attribute all the trials and tribulations of the industry and its workers to a single factor.
But at the core of that conflict is the collapse of organisational and political monopolies NUM represents. The union has enjoyed unrivalled power as the largest union for workers in its bargaining unit. It has used this monopoly to entrench itself in various ways – agency shop fees for non-members, rent-free offices on mine premises, control of mine compounds and full-time shaft stewards with perks.
No less important is the reliable revenue in the form of percentage-based membership dues.
Of relevance to the current contestation at Lonmin is the fact that this monopoly was underwritten by management, particularly in a context where personal relationships had developed between managers and union leaders. In some instances, there was a blurring of roles between full-time shaft stewards and human resources managers. For many companies, NUM had become predictable and therefore “safe” for management.
The emergence of Amcu has caused this organisational monopoly to unravel. One implication of this is that NUM has to share power with the new kid on the block. But the reality is that NUM has been dislodged and humiliated by its rival.
This is a bitter pill to swallow for a union used to the undisputed status of “the largest in the history of the country”. What makes the humiliation more galling is the fact that Amcu is an “upstart” formed by “malcontents” ejected from NUM just over a decade ago for refusing to toe the national leadership line.
The strike at Lonmin also represents a threat to the political monopoly NUM represents. In 1987, NUM, then five years old, nailed its colours to the mast of the “charterist/congress” alliance by being the first Cosatu union to adopt the Freedom Charter. Since then it has become the union standard bearer of the tripartite alliance.
Since 1991 all the ANC’s secretaries-general have come from NUM. The current general secretary of Cosatu also comes from the union. This is serious political capital for the union. In addition, the tripartite alliance is the only political current that has legitimacy within NUM.
Thus, the growth of Amcu, a union that claims to be “apolitical”, represents a serious threat to the tripartite alliance. That is why alliance organisations have pulled out all the stops to arrest the NUM decline in the Rustenburg area.
Since last year, Marikana has become the focal point of the struggle between those seeking to restore the erstwhile hegemony of NUM and the tripartite alliance, on the one hand, and those fighting to demolish such hegemony.
On the larger canvas of national politics, Marikana has earned its place among the symbols of resistance against the ruling political alliance.
Lonmin management have come out of the dispute looking biased against Amcu.
Its decision to refuse offices and infrastructure, even though it knows Amcu represents the majority, is suspect.
One would have expected management to negotiate a transitional arrangement whereby Amcu would also be provided with offices while the recognition agreement was being negotiated.
It’s hard to say whether this poor judgement by Lonmin is due to inexperience, incompetence or malice. But in the meantime, its actions (or inactions) continue to contribute to the climate of instability.
Amcu has a legitimate grievance. The majoritarian principle of union representivity is one of the bedrocks of the labour dispensation. NUM is a beneficiary of this principle and where it has majority representation, it has applied it to keep competitors, including Amcu, at bay.
However, Amcu is going to have to be careful about how it uses worker militancy. The union has become adept at playing political games with collective action. In private, the union seems happy with inciting the militant actions of workers, but in public, it pleads ignorance about the origins of these actions. This tactic may hold while the union remains an underdog in the mining sector, but it will not convince anyone in the long term. Amcu president Joseph Mathunjwa should know that leadership is about taking full responsibility for the actions of members.
That said, NUM, the tripartite alliance and management don’t seem to have tried to convince militants such as Comrade Bob to remain members. If anything, refusal to derecognise a minority NUM will continue to fuel suspicion the union is acting in cahoots with management.
NUM general secretary Frans Baleni has drawn my attention to what he says are factual errors in the way the Lonmin story has been told. He says Amcu has offices and shaft stewards at all Lonmin operations and NUM has been urging management to finalise a recognition agreement.
The implication of his argument is that there is a wider conspiracy at play which is motivated by broader political considerations.
While I note Baleni’s comments, I do not subscribe to the conspiracy theory. In the case of Marikana, “facts” have become highly contested. My argument stands.
* Not his real name
n Buhlungu is professor of sociology at the University of Pretoria. His latest book, Cosatu’s Contested Legacy , was published last year by HSRC Press.