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Leonard Gentle
The two biggest signifiers of the state of the labour movement in South Africa in 2014 are, on the one hand, a terminal crisis within what is still, formally, the biggest trade union centre — the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) aligned to the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), and, on the other, the emergence of new workplace militancies by workers, notably the national strike wave in the second half of 2013 and now a victorious strike by 70 000 platinum mineworkers in 2014, acting outside COSATU and sometimes outside the industrial relations machinery associated with COSATU’s gains in the early 1990s.

The second is about renewal and resurgence.

The first is about the sad demise of a once international inspiration.

To understand the significance of this new crossroad we should resist the temptation to start investigating the changing politics of South African labour by dipping into recent developments in the trade unions.

Seeing that COSATU has been the overwhelming centre of trade union developments for more than 20 years, this can become a COSATU-focused lens.

For much of South Africa’s recent history that focus may have had analytical shortcomings but no more than that required by the process of abstraction so necessary for any kind of historical enquiry.

So a study of the politics of labour in the 1980s and 1990s could be forgiven for starting with developments in COSATU and to privilege developments there for understanding important political shifts within the working-class and, thereby, South African politics at the national level.

But because, presumably, the identification of the politics of South African labour as an important topic today is by way of casting light on the broader political conjuncture — a conjuncture in which events such as the Marikana massacre of August 2012 and the December 2013 NUMSA decision to break with the ruling ANC seem to define — such a privileged relation between the working-class and COSATU cannot be presumed.

The Marikana moment and its aftermath — the 2012 national strike wave that it unleashed, in particular — were driven by workers in opposition to, and outside of, COSATU and its affiliates. And South Africa has experienced nearly 15 years of unbroken protests by working-class communities all over the country — dubbed the Revolt of the Poor by the University of Johannesburg’s Chair of Social Change — which have certainly shaped the political conjuncture without the involvement of the labour movement, and certainly not COSATU.

And the most politically significant strike in recent South African history — the 2014 platinum workers’ strike — is certainly changing both the politics of South African labour as well as the national politics of the country — witness the rise of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) — which drew on the militancy of the platinum belt and some of the community flashpoints. Yet one cannot understand these developments starting from a trade union lens.

So this article will claim that understanding the changing politics of labour requires us to step outside the confines of the trade unions and not even to take the trade unions as a point of departure, let alone a lens for viewing the developments within the trade unions. Instead it will privilege the changing make-up of the working-class and the changing political consciousness of a new movement of class struggle emerging today and assess events such as the NUMSA moment, the COSATU internal crisis, the emergence of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) and the changing national political landscape against these yardsticks.

In the meantime COSATU sinks into a quagmire. Its biggest affiliate — the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) — is being threatened with expulsion for breaking with the ANC, while nine affiliates call on the President to convene a Special Congress and want the courts to adjudicate.

Municipal union, SAMWU, workers and staff occupy its head office in protest at allegations that over R160-million has gone missing. Teachers’ union, SADTU, expels its president who is deemed to be too close to erstwhile suspended COSATU General Secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi. Vavi faces an enquiry into the selling of COSATU’s old building and the buying of the new one — the process conducted by the then head of COSATU’s investment arm Kopano ke Matla, Colin Matjila, who then moves on to head up the parastatal, Eskom.

Vavi is reinstated by the courts and then is forced to carry out electioneering for the ANC in the 2014 elections — whose ire he earned in the first place for accusing the ANC of turning COSATU into its “labour desk” (of course he found that going to an international ITUC Conference, conveniently, took him out of the firing line during the elections).

Then who offers to mediate the COSATU disputes? Why . . . the ANC? You couldn’t make this up if you tried. The ex-biggest affiliate, NUM, collapses in the platinum sector and only holds on to gold workers by dint of centralized bargaining with the Chamber of Mines and chemical union, CEPPWAWU, is threatened with de-registration by the Department of Labour for failing to submit regular membership updates.

This demise of COSATU is no cause for celebration or indifference.

Forged in the cauldron of thousands of strikes and campaigns and rightly celebrated for both being at the centre of the resistance movement against apartheid and for being the first within the mass movement to begin to formulate new policies for a revolutionary South Africa, COSATU’s history is a noble one written in the blood of workers. —The Bullet.