The living wage campaign dates back to Cosatu's launch in 1985. The campaign's key aims were to unite workers across sectors around a common set of demands and to coordinate struggle to ensure success. Over the years, Cosatu made changes to the core demands, while also varying the campaign's pace and vigour.
Millions of workers took up the demands of the campaign and achieved huge gains in terms of organisation, wages, conditions and benefits. Some of the earlier demands for paid public holidays, education and training, are now either law or in the process of becoming law.
These reforms and improvements are a tribute to the blood and courage of millions of struggling workers. From the start the campaign was most strongly rooted within affiliates around individual union struggles (e.g. the metal or mining wage negotiations).
It remains a challenge to this day for workers and Cosatu leadership to build the living wage campaign (LWC) so that struggles across sectors are co-ordinated and united around common demands .
The resolution adopted by Cosatu at its launching congress was called the national minimum living wage resolution. It resolved to fight for a national minimum living wage in law. Workers (not outside experts) would decide exactly how much the minimum wage would be. This Rand amount should automatically increase when prices increased (inflation), the resolution said. It also included a demand that bosses open their books so that workers could understand the profit system. From the outset, Cosatu saw this campaign as a weapon to organise the unorganised. It was something more than a struggle for wage increases - it was a struggle for a better society where workers' interests were dominant.
Before the launch of the campaign, these demands were to change. The Cosatu Central Executive Committee (CEC) felt that conditions and wage levels in SA were too different to set one national wage figure. Cosatu would continue to debate this issue right into the nineties, and to this day there is no Rand figure establishing either a national minimum or a living wage itself.
Only auto workers tabled the demand for an automatic wage increase when prices increased, despite the reality that wage negotiations often chase price increases, winning increases that are by no means automatic.
Key demands
Cosatu formally launched the campaign in 1987. The tools to mobilise, co-ordinate and publicise the campaign were mass regional rallies, local, regional and national structures, together with mass media. The key demands that would characterise the campaign for the following few years were:
But the real action was on the ground. 1987 was a year of fire for labour, bringing with it the longest strike wave the country has ever seen.
The year began with OK workers continuing their December 1986 wage strike, which became the longest ever national strike. Soon after this, thousands of railway and post office workers took to the streets. A number of railway workers were to lose their lives. Later in the year, mineworkers embarked on a massive national wage strike, called off after three weeks when the bosses, led by Anglo American, began dismissing tens of thousands of workers. It was these strikes and the actions of thousands of other workers that led Cosatu News to say: "Despite attacks on all fronts from the state, there is nothing on earth as powerful as the strength of organised labour."
But these experiences pointed strongly to the need for greater coordination and solidarity from the federation. A number of indicators emerged from the OK strike. During the strike, affiliates were drawn together into a short-lived Anglo American shopsteward council, food workers took blacking action, and the wider community engaged in a consumer boycott. The 1987 Cosatu Congress report highlighted the lack of solidarity, and lack of affiliate participation in LWC structures. This was to remain the pattern for the future. While especially the larger affiliates developed and sharpened their wage campaigns and strategies, the wider linkages through Cosatu were not made.
Demands extended
The 1987 Congress added more detail to the campaign's education and training demands, as well as stating the need to fight deregulation and exemptions. The 1990 campaigns conference, convened to develop more focus on Cosatu's core campaigns, further developed these issues.
On the one hand, there were demands against the deregulation and flexible employment practices of the bosses including:
As Cosatu unions grew in size during the eighties, the need for central bargaining grew. Affiliates like Numsa had used the metal industrial council very successfully, becoming the dominant union in the council. However, in response, certain employers tried to break up and withdraw from industrial councils, leading to a significant decline in their number. The state also made it more difficult to extend agreements reached and encouraged exemptions for small business (it also continued to allow wage determinations to lapse).
Barlow Rand was at the forefront of the employer attack on councils and collapsed several of them. This led to the affiliate campaign against Barlow Rand, and a six-week illegal strike by Ppwawu. Cosatu formally adopted both the demand for central bargaining and the campaign against Barlow Rand in 1990.
Affiliates the key
The struggles and campaigns of individual affiliates continued to be the main activity of the LWC. Federation-wide activity rarely bolstered the affiliate struggles. Unions increasingly developed more sophisticated approaches to wage bargaining, encouraged by larger affiliates such as the Num and Numsa. The issue of industrial restructuring led to negotiations and conferences in the mining, electronics and clothing/textiles industries.
Numsa spearheaded the skills-wage-training nexus, now substantially won in the auto sector, with the wages of lower graded workers benchmarked against the artisan.
A range of affiliates fought to establish or sit on jointly controlled training boards, setting guidelines and parameters for training in their industry. However, progress is uneven and some affiliates need to exert more control over these processes.
As the nineties unfolded, the hard line approach against flexibility changed. Unions became increasingly aware that they could not simply stop flexibility. Saccawu, for example, accepted a flexible working week earlier this year, in exchange for a reduction of casual workers. The Num, in accepting continuous production on the mines, aims to stabilise and increase employment while developing a wider programme to restructure the mines as a whole. And some unions gradually dropped the demand for a moratorium on retrenchment, with auto workers, for example, settling on a job-security fund, paid for by the bosses.
Need for direction
For the last few years, there has been very little attempt by Cosatu to coordinate the LWC. Where the federation has tried, affiliate attendance has been weak. Now it is important for Cosatu to recapture this terrain, and provide coherent direction and programme. This is clearly seen in the struggle for central bargaining. The new LRA provides for voluntary central bargaining, and so affiliates wanting to achieve this will have to continue to win it through struggle.
Affiliates can continue to struggle in isolation. Some, like TGWU and CWIU, have achieved success through this. But a preferable route would be to coordinate and share resources, building a wider struggle to embrace the many affiliates which still have decentralised bargaining.
Similarly, Nedlac opens the opportunity for national bargaining around a range of issues. For example, in renegotiating the basic conditions of employment act, Cosatu could campaign for a 40-hour week. Another example is the provision of the new LRA for the extension of the one-week retrenchment pay for each year of service.
But the nuts and bolts of a living wage campaign is always wage rates. While real wages have largely tracked inflation, a number of industries have made progress in reducing the gap between skilled (largely white) and unskilled (largely black) workers.
The picture is wider though - huge number of workers now have access to retirement funds, often jointly controlled with the bosses; and there are gains in other benefits like medical funds, shift allowances, etc. It is undoubtedly true that unionised workers in South Africa have far higher wages and benefits than ununionised workers - the struggles of Cosatu and millions of ordinary workers have made this possible.
But there is still the need for greater coordination. The investigation by a commission set up by the Department of Labour into a national minimum wage calls for Cosatu intervention. The common demands across affiliates to reduce the gap between skilled and unskilled workers also calls for wider Cosatu coordination.
The apparent coordination of employers, led by Anglo American, to hold last year's auto settlement at 10% and prevent a knock-on impact for other industries, also suggests the need for labour to develop similar levels of coordination. And if sectors like metal, set trends later followed by other sectors, it is may be worth putting more resources and power into the metal sector, to reap the gains for other workers.
There are also issues that need further debate and focus. There is the massive wage gap between management/directors and workers; middle management earns 8 to 12 times what an unskilled worker earns, directors can earn more than 30 times the amount.
There is a widening gap between manufacturing wages and workers' wages in the largely unorganised farm and domestic sectors. This calls for the development of a solidarity-based wage policy, where the power of more organised sectors of labour assist the unorganised. This calls for serious attention, given its divisive potential.
Two other issues need attention. The right-wing chorus accusing unions of creating unemployment through pushing up wages and preventing the establishment of small business, needs firm and powerful opposition.
The push from employers to increase productivity through super exploitation of workers also demands a coherent response. Some unions are responding to this, again captured by the recent auto agreement devolving productivity bargaining to plant level. But a lack of a clear strategy may lead to division between workers.
Even simply at the level of information-sharing there is a vast role for Cosatu. The nineties have bred new issues and new complexities. Campaigns are the meat of building organisation and the best way to ensure rank and file attendance in structures. The living wage campaign remains at the heart of worker struggle. Building solidarity, coordinating and uniting workers are basics for worker organisation.
Rob Rees, Naledi