Dinga Sikwebu reviews the recently released “Cosatu in Crisis”, a new book which examines the origins of the problems facing the trade union federation.
In any bruising battle nothing suffers more than truth and facts. Nowhere has this truism been demonstrated than in the fight that has raged openly in Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and that culminated in the final expulsion from the federation of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) and former general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi. Using mythology and folktales, protagonists in the fight have been involved in full-blown truth-bending as well as in attempts to sketch a picture where there are only angels on their side and devils across the battle line.
Although in the exchanges consensus emerged that the trade union federation has for a while not been well, there are divergent views about when the rot set in. There is also no agreement on the diagnosis of the sickness and medication to be prescribed. There are even different interpretations of the recent national congress; with one wing shouting that a fifth column that represents “neoliberal capitalist reaction” has stolen the once mighty Cosatu while the victors at last week's gathering showed a delirium of joy with arguments that the worst is over.
None other than the re-elected Cosatu president S'dumo Dlamini expressed the delusion that the fight is over, when in his opening address to the congress he declared that the federation was about to enter “a period of bright sunshine characterised by robustness, organisational unity and cohesion”. This optimism is not surprising. For Dlamini, the crisis in Cosatu “has been the existence of an illegitimate political agenda which was planned and driven from outside”. How accurate then are assertions that Cosatu has been “stolen” or that the federation has passed through “externally-manufactured organisational challenges”?
To assess the scale of the challenges that face Cosatu, one needs step back from the passionate claims and counter-claims; and refer to a compendium of articles included in a recent book; Cosatu in Crisis: The Fragmentation of an African Trade Union Federation. With Vishwas Satgar and Roger Southall as editors, Cosatu in Crisis is a collection of ten chapters mainly written by academics that historically studied or have been associated with the labour movement in South Africa. The book is based on a shospteward survey conducted face-to-face with 2 051 Cosatu shopstewards in 2012.
Published on the eve of Cosatu's national congress, the book dispels Dlamini's argument that the problems in Cosatu are direct result of an external political agenda to destabilise the federation. It also debunks the myth that Numsa sympathisers often raise that the crisis in the trade union federation began in the run-up to the eleventh national congress held in 2012; where there were attempts by some union leaders to give Vavi a boot. Cosatu in Crisis also provides no evidence to back the assertion that Vavi makes in the book's foreword that the battle within the federation reflects “contradictions between those leaders who have been won over to the side of the defenders of a neoliberalist South African capitalism” and “those who are determined to continue … the struggle for socialism”.
Although not in full agreement about when the crisis of the union federation began, the different authors present a diagnosis that reveals that Cosatu's woes are multifaceted, deep and go back many years. One contributor traces the crisis in Cosatu to the compromise reached in the federation's formative years between the United Democratic Front (UDF)-aligned unions and affiliates with strong independent shopfloor traditions that mostly but not exclusively were associated with the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu). Other authors attribute the rot to the entry of Cosatu into the Tripartite Alliance with the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) in the early 1990s.
However one periodises when the problem began, there is general agreement among the majority of the contributors that alignment to the ruling party and the orientation to the state was and is still a major obstacle to Cosatu forging alliances with other social movements. It is also a source of the growth of a distance between the federation and community struggles. The analysis in Cosatu in Crisis shows that although two-thirds of respondents agreed that service delivery was poor, the 2012 survey of Cosatu shosptewards revealed that that just a third of those interviewed participated in community organisations and that under a quarter had participated in a community protest. The over-reliance on striking deals in Tripartite Alliance summits seemed to have turned the attention from the real task of building the organisation and campaigns from below with other non-labour movements.
The chapter on post-independence African trade union makes a strong case that should Cosatu realised that its alignment to the ANC and SACP took place in a period of neoliberal triumphalism and not in the era where liberation movements championed national development, the federation should have detected the unlikelihood and remoteness of the Tripartite Alliance and the ANC pursuing a progressive economic strategy,
But it is not only the issue of political alignment that the contributors see as the sources of the crisis in Cosatu. They point to five other factors that have been eating up Cosatu: the inability to organise precarious labour; the changing class composition of Cosatu's membership; the depoliticisation of shospteward layers; bureaucratisation and fragmentation.
Firstly, the majority of the authors highlight the inability of Cosatu to adequately respond to what one contributor describes as a “de facto deregulation of the labour market”. Drawing on different studies and reports, Cosatu in Crisis portrays an experience of many workers where permanent wage work is becoming 'atypical' while forms of work that were earlier in the 1990s referred as 'atypical' such as casual work, temporary employment and labour broking are becoming the norm. Despite numerous resolutions to organise these vulnerable sectors of the labour force, unions on both sides of the Cosatu fight remain organisations of fulltime and permanent. Bifurcation of workers is real as there are no significant inroads made to organise precarious workers.
Secondly, class differentiation refers to increasing gradations within the workforce and between union officials and ordinary workers. Three chapters in the book refer to the increase in the number of Cosatu members who occupy supervisory, clerical and semi-professional occupations relative to semi-skilled and unskilled workers. There is also a growing weight of public service unions within the federation. Cosatu in Crisis puts at 39 per cent in 2012 the membership of Cosatu drawn from public sector unions. This is a significant growth if one considers that public servants constituted only 7 per cent in 1991.
The third development that the 2012 survey reveals and that is analysed in Cosatu in Crisis is widespread de-politicisation and de-radicalisation of Cosatu shopstewards. More than three quarters (78 per cent) of shosptewards surveyed believe that trade unions must be concerned with worker than societal issues. More than two thirds of those who took part in the research believe that in the context of an economic crisis, workers must be protected first before the plight of unemployed is addressed. Close to half of the shopstewards believe that strikes do not yield the required results and more interestingly 58 per cent of those surveyed believe that it is their role to curtail and prevent strikes. These findings call into question that assumption held by both camps that shopsteward are the political backbone of a progressive labour movement.
The fourth processes that the book discerns are varying levels of bureaucratisation within Cosatu and its affiliates. The authors point to numerous institutions that have been established in the post-1994 period which require skilled officials with higher levels of education and knowledge. These developments have led to a creation of a layer of fulltime officials, office bearers and shosptewards who enjoy better benefits compared to their peers. The post-1994 dispensation has opened floodgates for promotion of shoptewards and appointment of officials into managerial positions Two-thirds of those interviewed in the 2012 do not see anything untoward in shosptewards graduating and being promoted into managerial positions.
One chapter tracks this process of bureaucratisation to the level of shopstewards. Breaking from the stereotype that the shopstewards perceive themselves or act permanently in opposition to management, the book reports that 35 per cent of the respondents saw commonality between them as worker representatives and management. The shopstewards' role in 'manufacturing compromise' through on one hand representing workers and on the other hand helping to resolve grievances, puts them in a contradictory where according to some authors a distinction can be made between “militants” and “managerials” within the shopsteward group.
The fifth factor that undermines Cosatu according to the authors is the ongoing fragmentation of the labour movement. Cosatu in Crisis paints a picture of a system of industrial relations and collective bargaining that is under severe pressure and strain. As levels of unemployment, inequality and poverty increase; workers turn to collective bargaining as an instrument of redistribution in a drive to take of care of their plight and that of their unemployed family members. The use collective bargaining as an instrument of redistribution has led to protracted strikes whose main trigger are demands for higher wages. The inability of unions to carry forward these wage struggles have led to disenchantment with existing unions and formation of breakaway unions.
While the authors have tried to analyse what is clearly a difficult and evolving, there are obvious silences in their analysis and in some instances a lapse into default analytical paradigms that have led Cosatu into a political cul-de-sac. Two such analytical lapses are the way the introduction of the raft of mid-1990s labour legislation is viewed and the treatment of the introduction of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) strategy in 1996 as the turning point the country's economic policy making processes. Instead of viewing the introduction of the laws like the Labour Relations Act (LRA) and Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA as both a codification of rights won by workers from the 1970s and as instruments to blunt workers' militancy, the new laws and institutional arrangements are heralded as the new dawn for labour. Similar to both wings in the Cosatu fight, some of the chapters in Cosatu in Crisis attribute federation's loss of power to the introduction of Gear in 1996; blinding us from seeing how 'late apartheid' flirted with neoliberalism and how through think-tanks like the Economic Trends Group and Industrial Strategy Project (ISP) Cosatu and Numsa dabbled with policies of global competitiveness and advocated policies that called for opening of South Africa' economy.
Cosatu in Crisis is silent on a number of issues that are vital in coming to grips with the sources and elements of the crisis in the trade union movement. For instance, the book does not touch on the process of centralisation that transformed Cosatu from a loose to a centralist federation with an over-reach that allows the centre to intervene in affiliates. The book is also silent about the rise of powerful general secretaries that accompanied the decline in workers' control in affiliates. The book is mum on organisational cultures that have developed within unions; leading to hierarchies, authoritarianism, majoritarian practices that trample on rights of significant minorities, anti-democratic tendencies and politics built on masculine sexual entitlements. The book fails to look at how organisational structures and bargaining strategies have been unable to act as counterweights to bureaucratisation and depoliticisation of shopstewards. No chapter in the book deals with the decline in internal democracy and the drift into political monolithicism; as Cosatu outsourced formulation of its political perspectives to the SACP. Although 71 per cent of respondents in the 2012 shopsteward survey agreed that there was corruption in unions, nowhere in Cosatu in Crisis is there an analysis of how unions as organisations have become enmeshed in capitalist networks as procurers of good and services; and through a network of unionists who sit on boards and who disperse billions to asset management companies as trustees of benefit funds. Not touched in the book is how in this context, patronage works and is used within unions.
Without an honest assessment of how we got here, the labour movement risks the possibility of losing its relevance and further fragmentation. Without deep soul-searching Cosatu will just be a rump that stumbles from one disaster to the next. Unless the federation tackles some of the issues raised in the book as well as the silences highlighted above, Dlamini's closing remarks that the twelfth national congress closes an old chapter and opens a new one will remain empty words. Equally; for those who aspire to revitalise the labour movement and are talking about a new federation, without an honest balance sheet and their complicity in the mess the union movement is in what they will build will be nothing more than a carbon copy of a degenerate Cosatu.
* Sikwebu is a coordinator of the United Front.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.