Over the last two decades we built powerful trade union organisations through which we advanced the position of workers in South Africa. We won basic trade union rights in the workplace and improved the wages and working conditions of union members. The unions we built also played a leading role in the struggle for a democratic South Africa. This involvement helped to place the interests of workers firmly on the reconstruction programme of the new democracy.
These achievements of the past will not guarantee that the union movement today will be able to protect and advance the interests of workers. The new context in which we are located is complex and contradictory. While unions have many new opportunities, they are open to pressures that would weaken them and prepare them for eventual cooption by the interests of business. A key defence and an important weapon of attack for us is our organisational strength and capability. If we are to build on our organisational achievements of the past, then we must look critically at these experiences.
The significance of our organisational achievements
The organisations we built were not only an important means to bring about change, they constituted an important change in themselves. The new unions of the 1970's were a significant innovation in mass organisation. Thousands of workers were introduced as active and conscious participants of democratic organisations. Workers, drawn from the ranks of the semi-skilled and excluded from the strata of decision-makers, learned the skills of organisation and emerged as leaders within industry as well as the community.
This new model of organising had a strong influence on the organisations of the mass movement of the 1980's and 1990's. The successful organising strategies of the new unions showed that a trade union, while located in the sphere of industrial relations, could play a direct role in the political life of workers. Skillful organising tactics brought together the needs of the individual and the collective, linked the short-term interests of workers to their long-term goals and integrated a programme of reform with a programme for transformation.
Weaknesses
Successful union organising campaigns led to a rapid increase in membership and the expansion of union structures and staff. At the same time, unions were confronted with increasingly complex issues. Union work shifted from recruiting at the factory gates to negotiating over the boardroom table.
Mobilising tactics that the unions perfected in "street fights" with the bosses were less important as the unions increasingly took their fights into the rooms of the industrial courts.
These changes demanded that the unions develop the skills of its shopstewards and organisers, increase union research, education and communications capabilities and build an efficient administrative support system.
The unions failed to make this transition from the simple organisations that it built to the more complex ones demanded by the changed situation.
Local organisers and shopstewards were not able to effectively use the company or industry level agreements nor the legal rights they fought so hard to win. Strategic union initiatives increasingly emerged from the national union office or that of progressive labour lawyers. Action at the local level remained defensive in nature. The local declined in importance within the union, except as a CENTRE for top-down communication.
Union administration earned a reputation for being inefficient and unreliable and the staff discipline emerged as a chronic problem. Union leadership was aware of these organisational problems but were unable to deal with them effectively.
These weaknesses arose partly from the context of political resistance. Union strategies increasingly focused on the objective of building the resistance against the apartheid state. The skills problems and administrative weaknesses slipped lower down on the list of organisational priorities.
There was however a deeper structural reason which explains the failure of the union to resolve its problem and this relates to the implementation of the principle of "worker control". All union policy decisions, both political and administrative, had to be made within worker-controlled structures of the union. This control extended to the formulation of union programmes as well as their implementation. Union secretaries and coordinators had no power to make financial decisions and had little or no authority over other staff. The union decision-making structures became overloaded within minor administrative and complex policy decisions. They failed in executing both efficiently. This attempt at realising worker control ironically undermined effective worker control.
The new context
The post-apartheid terrain takes the union into yet another new context which demands a different organisational response. The difference however is that, this time round, the changes are structural. The democratic transition has redefined the relationship, particularly of black workers to government. This arises from the fact that workers, as with other citizens of the country, have basic democratic rights.
Unions are urged by the new government to cooperate in building a productive industrial base that would protect jobs and boost economic growth. This economic growth is important, it is argued, to strengthen the hand of the new government to implement programmes to provide education, health care, housing and create the conditions for the creation of jobs.
Business strategy, on the other hand is also undergoing significant changes. The change in production technology and the more aggressive forces of competition have led to different conditions for success. Factors such as "quality" and "time to market" stand as equally important to "price". To succeed in the new market, business requires greater participation and cooperation from workers on production decisions.
There are opportunities in this new context. The unions can influence industry policies and strategies and advance the interests of workers in the long run. However the unions' short-term cooperation strategies can lead to the weakening of the independence of unions and to their eventual cooption.
However, this is a possibility which is not inevitable. The outcome of this engagement with business and government depends importantly on whether the unions are able to reshape their organisation to fight under new conditions.
The challenge
The strategic challenge for the unions is to make the shift from simple opposition to one which will integrate opposition with strategic cooperation.
This implies that the union must define a new idea on which to redesign its organisation. The idea on which union organisation emerged was that of a "giant" capable of withstanding the attacks of the apartheid state. In the new context a more appropriate idea is one that signifies organisational creativity, skill and efficiency combined with a strategic militant capability. The new organisation must be able to "float like a butterfly" in and out of the new participative institutions and at the same time have the ability, and be ready to, "sting like a bee".
Priorities for organisation building
The following are some issues that must be addressed if the unions are to begin to make this organisational transition:
Senior union staff and office bearers must redefine their leadership style. While the days of resistance to apartheid nurtured union leaders as "heroes of the struggle", the more complex task of building the new organisation requires leaders to be "facilitators" of local creativity and organisational efficiency. The role of the "hero" must be returned to workers on the workplace floor.
Bobby Marie, Numsa