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The Current Crisis of the South African Labour Movement

Literature › Works

Peter Rachleff (2001). The Current Crisis of the South African Labour Movement. Labour / Le Travail, Vol. 47. Canadian Committee on Labour History and Athabasca University Press.
Type journal article
Scope Post-1994 South African economy
Method mixed
Period studied 1946–2000
Regions Uitenhage, Eastern Cape, Port Elizabeth, Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town
Themes unions strikes, transition post apartheid, labour markets wages, resistance social movements, manufacturing industrial policy, inequality poverty unemployment
Citation key rachleff2001

Argument

Rachleff uses the January-2000 wildcat strike at Volkswagen's Uitenhage plant as a microcosm of the post-1994 crisis of the South African labour movement. He argues that the ANC government's neo-liberal GEAR programme and the demands of global capital have pushed COSATU and NUMSA leaders to enforce management's 'flexibility' agenda against their own rank and file. Rank-and-file militants from the FOSATU shopfloor-democracy tradition were therefore driven to act against both their employer and their union. The article closes with a survey of grassroots alternatives (OCGAWU, anti-privatisation coalitions, SEWU, domestic worker organising) and international solidarity. It is a sympathetic, activist-historian account built from interviews, press reports and activist documents, written for a US labour audience.

Evidence and method

Newspaper and business-press reports (Business Report, The Star, Saturday Independent, Daily Dispatch), activist and dissident documents (Uitenhage Crisis Committee updates, Workers International Vanguard League, World Socialist Website), CCMA hearing testimony as reported, statements by Mbeki and ministers, and the author's interviews during a three-week visit in January 2000. Secondary literature on GEAR (Bond, Sitas, Barchesi, NIEP) is cited in footnotes.

Findings

  • The Uitenhage strike began as a 300-worker walkout over the dismissal of shop stewards and grew to thousands, with mass dismissals. (p. 3)

    300 workers walked off the job at the Volkswagen plant in Uitenhage, in an illegal strike protesting the dismissal of thirteen shop stewards.

  • VW management demanded 'flexibility' in the form of longer hours, six-day continuous production and loss of overtime and rest provisions, which Rachleff reads as reversing gains made under apartheid. (p. 4)

    compulsory overtime without advance notice, overtime up to twelve hour shifts and seventy hour weeks, the reduction of tea breaks from two to one per shift

  • Strikers argued that conditions had worsened since the end of apartheid. (p. 5)

    Wages and working conditions at VW are now worse than they were in the apartheid period.

  • NUMSA agreed to the changes without a worker vote, contradicting the FOSATU tradition of shopfloor democracy. (p. 5)

    had agreed to all of these changes without once giving the workers an opportunity to vote them up or down.

  • Uitenhage unemployment was extremely high, giving VW a large pool of replacement labour. (p. 9)

    NUMSA shook its collective head and pointed to an unemployment rate in Uitenhage of 63 per cent.

  • President Mbeki framed strikes as a threat to investor confidence and announced a market-oriented programme. (p. 10)

    the ANC's standing in the eyes of the investor community cannot be held hostage by elements pursuing selfish and anti-social purposes.

  • The government deployed police and army against a threatened stayaway in Uitenhage. (p. 10)

    the government (yes, the ANC government) announced that it was stepping up the already heavy police presence in the city and sending in army troops to back them up

  • The strike cost VW substantial revenue and put the export contract behind schedule. (p. 12)

    the strike had put VWSA 3,300 units behind on its "A4" Golf contract, for a loss of 275 million rand in revenue.

  • GEAR replaced the RDP and endorsed neo-liberal measures, with privatisation and labour-law 'flexibility' reforms. (p. 13)

    Mandela's "rdp" (Reconstruction and Development Program) had been replaced by Mbeki's "GEAR" (Growth, Employment, and Redistribution)

  • Despite capital-friendly policy, the post-1994 economy saw capital outflow, white emigration, weak foreign investment and very high black unemployment. (p. 14)

    Unemployment among black citizens, difficult to measure precisely, has been estimated at 30-40-50 per cent in different regions of the country.

  • COSATU's response was limited to symbolic protest, while union leaders enforced management agendas, a deterioration since the mid-1980s. (p. 14)

    COSATU leaders have stuck to organizing symbolic protests like the 10 May one day "general strike" and demonstrations on Sundays and holidays