WOMEN WORKER LEADERS
At Samwu’s 5th national congress last year, cde Desiree Tlhoaele was elected as the union’s second vice president — the first woman national office bearer in the union’s history.
A health worker in the Mafikeng Health Department and a Samwu member for the past five years, cde Desiree holds the struggle for womens’ empowerment very close to her heart.
The early years of her working life were spent in Bophuthatswana, now in the North West Province. The bantustan authorities outlawed democratic trade unions and political activities were heavily repressed. "In all our minds, we were getting angrier and angrier," says Tlhoaele.
Racism was rife — white officials would not talk to black workers, let alone negotiate wage increases and recognition agreements with them. Racism reached a crisis point when the AWB invaded Mafikeng in 1993. During the blockade of the town, white council officials commandeered emergency municipal vehicles that were used for the invasion. Many municipal workers were assaulted by officials. Although a commission of enquiry was set up afterwards to investigate, none of the officials were ever prosecuted.
Tlhoaele recalls that wages were as low as R150 a week back then — workers could not even afford transport to get work ... let alone feed their families.
"People engaged in alcohol abuse thinking they could drown their sorrows. Some sober ones got angrier by the day and could softly voice their dissatisfaction. People would meet around corners and at night in certain places to discuss worker issues," says Tlhoaele.
When Mangope was overturned and the former homeland became South Africa’s North West province, the time was ripe for municipalities to be organised by Samwu.
Wildcat strikes started to break out and finally council officials came up with a proposal for a staff association in Mmabatho City Council. Cde Tlhoaele recalls that workers were saved from this at the last minute by three Samwu organisers who were contacted during dark hours to explain why a staff association would simply be a toothless dog.
The organisers managed to get the Local Government Association to invite the Samwu general secretary to speak to workers. Although Samwu shared a platform with other unions and staff associations, all workers but six joined Samwu. Tlhoaele was one of those who joined the union early in 1994 and quickly became a very active member.
Tlhoaele has always been involved in Samwu women’s structures. She feels strongly that, with so few women employed in local government, the union’s quota system will assist women in making their voices heard.
"I would like to open up a challenge to all Samwu women out there — stand up, form your Constitutional Structures, as you have fought for your rights to be in the constitution, and be seen to be active," says Tlhoaele.
She hopes to continue empowering women through her portfolio as the Samwu national office bearer in charge of the National Women’s Committee.
Cde Tlhoaele feels that the biggest challenge to unions right now is to combat GEAR as an ANC policy and to fight privatisation of municipal services. "I personally feel very strongly against privatisation of state assets as it has a rolling effect on all of the citizens of South Africa, not only Council employees.
"I thank all comrades who have entrusted me this office as second vice president. I hope to be a role model to all of you. Let us wake up and be ‘go-getters’, no manna is going to fall from heaven." A woman’s place is in the struggle, not the kitchen. Amandla!
Cde Desiree gets a lot of support from her husband, also a Samwu member, and believes that her children are benefitting from having a strong and active mother. "My children grew up in an atmosphere that created strong minds and independence for themselves. My husband could not quite understand why this serious involvement with the union until he finally became a member. We are now talking the same language..." she says, adding that he always awaits her return with open arms and so do the children, who are four and seven years old.
A workshop of the Tripartite Alliance’s gender structures has agreed on the need to mobilise women around concrete campaigns as part of the process of building a national women’s movement.
The workshop from 3 - 5 April was attended by about 100 delegates from the ANC Women’s League, Cosatu and the SACP.
After some debate, delegates agreed that a national women movement in South Africa should not be seen as an organisation, but as a network of women and organisations united around specific campaigns and demands.
The Alliance must play a central role in building the women’s movement. Building the Alliance and ensuring that its structures function more effectively was therefore seen as crucial to this process.
Three priority areas were identified around which to mobilise and campaign:
The workshop set up a coordinating committee to ensure effective coordination of the Alliance at national and provincial levels and to begin to implement the workshop’s recommendations. A further meeting of the Alliance gender structures will be held in May to assess progress and to engage in further debate and planning.
It has been a long time since Alliance gender structures have put their heads together on how to take forward gender struggles and the workshop was therefore seen as an important turning point.
The building of a national women’s movement has been on the agenda for years but, until now, little concrete progress has been made. The ANC, Cosatu and the SACP have all taken resolutions on the need to build a women’s movement but until the workshop there had been little clarity on what this process should involve.
ANC deputy secretary general Cde Thenjiwe Mthintso in an input at the workshop pointed to some of the key challenges facing the Alliance in taking up gender struggles.
"Gender equality is not a by-product of democracy," she said, "there is a need to deliberately engage to ensure that gender transformation is an integral part of democratic transformation."
To ensure this, we need to understand the policy framework within which we operate and to develop and assess a gendered perspective in our policies and programmes.
We also need to look at what it means to mainstream, institutionalise and integrate gender into all aspects of policy, including policy formulation and implementation as well as monitoring and evaluation.
Gendered policy
Policies of the movement and its component organisations need to be evaluated to see whether they effectively integrate gender perspectives. For example, to what extent does government’s macro-economic framework, Gear, take on board the nature of gender relations and the particular interests of women? It also needs to be assessed in terms of its impact on women’s lives, especially poor and working class women.
Among the challenges facing women within the national democratic revolution is the need to challenge patriarchal ideology and practices in the broader society and its institutions, in the economy, the media, government and the family.
Having identified the key policy needs and challenges of the NDR during the transformation period, we can then assess the types of structures needed to deal with these challenges, Mthintso said. The Alliance gender structures also had to assess whether they were sufficiently organised to take up these challenges.
In a frank and open assessment of the ANC, SACP and Cosatu gender structures, Mthintso highlighted a number of strengths and weaknesses. This was critical since the building of a strong and vibrant women’s movement depends largely on the strength and leadership of Alliance structures.
ANC Womens' League
One of the ANC Womens League’s strengths is that it is a political organisation because of its links with the ANC and its history of struggle. It has automatic membership drawn from the ANC and has a relatively secure resource base.
However, some of its strengths could also be weaknesses. For example, the Women’s League’s relationship with the ANC means it often focusses on building the ANC and on ANC programmes and policies. At times it neglects gender issues. Generally the ANCWL does not effectively influence ANC policy in a coherent way or offer a critical voice around gender struggles. A failure to constructively deal with internal problems in the ANCWL also limits its effectiveness.
SACP
A strength of the SACP’s gender desk is that it is guided by an ideology that is generally coherent and the SACP is able to put its class bias and ideological perspectives clearly on the table. The disadvantage of this is that these are sometimes rejected as "just the communists". Weaknesses include a lack of resources and the fact that few women workers are SACP members. Few SACP women are active in the ANCWL and there is some suspicion and a lack of acceptance of communists. It is critical that constructive ways are found of relating to one another as we cannot afford to exclude each other.
Cosatu
The federation is numerically strong, well-organised at the workplace, is able to take up bread and butter issues and has a base which can be mobilised. However, it generally fails to take up gender struggles of working class women beyond the workplace. Another weakness is the lack of an integrated approach to gender in Cosatu’s policies and programmes. The challenge for Cosatu is to address gender issues in a holistic manner.
A key challenge for the Alliance gender structures is how to impact meaningfully on decisions in leadership structures as well as the representivity of structures. This should not only focus on quantity. It should also ensure that the development of women’s leadership involves the transformation of organisations to include women and to challenge patriarchal attitudes and stereotypes. In addition, there is a need to challenge the unequal gender power relations in our organisations.
The workshop heard robust debates on the role and future of the Women’s National Coalition (WNC), its relationship with the national women’s movement and the role of Alliance structures within the WNC. Some delegates highlighted the WNC’s failure to take up concrete campaigns of working class women. Others argued that the WNC’s role is to draw together a broad range of women from different class and political interests around common issues. The challenge for the Alliance is to draw up a concrete programme for the WNC against which its successes and failures can be measured.
