What about the workers? The demise of COSATU and the emergence of a new movement

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Notes

1 Prior to the AMCU strike, in the apartheid decades of the recent past there had been other strikes of longer duration in the 1980s – one thinks of the Sarmcol strike – and there was a short mining strike by NUM workers in 1987 which involved more workers than the 70,000. But these occurred at a high point of mass struggles in the country and, while those workers faced hostility from the employers and the state, they enjoyed the active support of the whole of the labour movement, not to mention the liberation movement.

2 At the time of writing, Vavi has been reinstated by the courts, and the ANC (supposedly the bête noire of the COSATU disputes) is ‘mediating' the dispute.

3 The partially privatised road agency, South African National Roads Agency (SANRAL), has imposed a toll fee to motorists on roads around Johannesburg to recoup its building and maintenance costs and costs of borrowing. These fees will be levied electronically as motorists pass under gantries where their numberplates are scanned.

4 South Africa's Labour Relations Act, Basic Conditions of Employment Act and their associated institutions of the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, the Sector Education Training Authorities and the National Economic, Development and Labour Council came out of a series of engagements around the National Economic Forum, the Labour Market Commission and the National Training Board between 1990 and 1995. Like the World Trade Centre negotiations at Kempton Park, which shaped South African political compromises, there was a similar set of trade-offs being enacted within the labour market sphere between Labour (essentially COSATU) and Big Business.

5 This characterisation is sometimes, wrongly, termed a ‘precariat' so as to distinguish this restructured working class from a ‘proper working class’. Deep in this kind of argument is the idea that the notion of the working class is reserved for those in work – presumably because the working class is exploited at the point of production and that capitalist exploitation is a ‘production thing’. But the working class is exploited across the totality of its insertion into capitalist relations of production – in both the spheres of production and reproduction.

6 Today the large COSATU affiliates are public sector, white-collar workers – the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU), the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (NEHAWU) and the unions amongst white-collar workers in the parastatals – Telkom, the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU), and Transnet and the South African Transport and Allied Workers' Union (SATAWU). The lower-level blue-collar workers are now in labour brokers and in services that have been completely outsourced – like cleaning, security etc., so they do not fall within the bargaining units of the Public Sector Bargaining Council.

7 This was an attack on Abahlali baseMjondolo at Kennedy Road informal settlement in KwaZulu-Natal. On 26 September 2009, the organisation was attacked which led to the displacement of hundreds, and in the violence two were murdered. Twelve members of Abahlali baseMjondolo were charged with murder, though the case was eventually dismissed. The claim was made that the attack was orchestrated by ANC members.

8 Joseph Mthunjwa, the President of AMCU, had been a regional leader dismissed by NUM's then General Secretary (now ANC's Secretary) Gwede Mantashe, on what his supporters claimed were trumped-up charges. Moreover, even in the years when NUM was at its height, workers at individual mines often had a high degree of independence from the union.