Address by COSATU General Secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, Input to SAPU Congress, 23 November 2005 in Durban

 

President and General Secretary of the union

Leaders of the union from all structures of the union, Invited guests from sister unions

Dear friends and comrades,

It is an honour and a privilege to have this opportunity to address this important SAPU Congress. The fact that you have asked me, as the COSATU general secretary, shows how far SAPU and the labour movement as a whole has travelled. We must express our gratitude to the many who contributed to our progress.

It seems strange, but not so long ago any police union was seen as subversive, even treasonous. Not so long ago, I would never have dreamt that I would address a public meeting of hundreds of police and call them friends and comrades. That only changed with the formation of POPCRU and later SAPU.

We are proud that COSATU was critical in the struggle that made it possible for all workers, including the police, to organise - to give workers a voice, to negotiate our demands, and to protect and defend ourselves.

This year is particularly important for COSATU because it is our 20th anniversary. Two decades ago in December, a giant was formed to defend the South African working class. You are all invited to the rallies and celebrations we plan to commemorate this important anniversary.

Today, COSATU is by far the largest and most influential labour federation in our country and one of the most influential trade unions in the world. No other group comes close, especially if we take audited figures into account.

That is why COSATU affiliates now represent the majority of public servants overall, from doctors and nurses to teachers, labourers and officials.

Indeed, the diversity of COSATU's membership in the public service reflects the scope of its membership in the economy as a whole. COSATU started as the defence of blue-collar workers, but it is now home to employees from all walks of life - from doctors and teachers to cleaners, from factory and farm workers to government directors, from sales clerks and bank officials to miners and construction workers. Police and correctional services are in COSATU. It makes no sense to divide police.

There are two reasons for COSATU's growth in the past 20 years.

Fundamentally, our growth reflects the fact that workers increasingly see that they need unity and solidarity to make gains. As individuals, no worker has power. As union members, they can count on protection from their comrades, and they can help defend and support each other.

The second reason for COSATU's growth is that when we won democracy, workers also gained full labour rights.

For the first time, workers felt they could join a union without facing persecution from the state and employers. In the public sector, in particular, workers were for the first time legally allowed to join a union and to strike - with some limitations, as the police know better than anyone.

This favourable legal environment has, however, gone hand in hand with substantial restructuring in the economy and the state. Workers have faced new threats to their jobs as the opening of the economy led to cuts in tariffs, more competition with local producers, and constraints on government spending and employment.

In these circumstances, employers have launched an aggressive strategy to downsize and hold the line on workers' pay. Overall, the share of wages in the national income has declined, while unemployment has risen to 40%. Union members have generally maintained their pay and benefits, but other workers have suffered badly.

In response to this situation, COSATU has found it must throw resources into engagements on the transformation of the economy and the public sector. We have had to formulate strategies to ensure that the cost of change does not fall on workers. That is why we now have a Parliamentary Office, a Policy Unit and a research institute, NALEDI.

The challenge has been to ensure that our policy engagements are rooted in the needs of our members. COSATU leaders and shop stewards must work hard to make sure our unions understand the issues and can mandate our positions. Despite these difficulties, we feel that our policy work has been particularly important in ensuring that our affiliates in the public sector, especially, can take a strategic approach to transformation and the hard choices that face public servants in the process.

Comrades and friends,

COSATU comes from a tradition of struggle to change the broader social context. That is because we realise that we cannot improve life for our members if we focus only on our workplaces while the economy continues to generate poverty and unemployment on a mass scale.

COSATU was created just 20 years ago. But its foundations were laid through decades of struggle in conjunction with the liberation movement. COSATU arose from the wars of liberation. Our roots lie in the linked traditions of worker solidarity and community resistance that runs through South Africa's history.

COSATU itself brought together the struggle of the workers and the struggle for freedom with its founding slogan: Workers are community members before they are workers!

As a union federation, COSATU fought for freedom because we could see that winning higher wages or better benefits would be almost impossible if our people remained subject to vicious political and social oppression. The huge improvement in workers' legal position today underscores the correctness of that position.

Today, we are proud that we are still part of the liberation alliance. That alliance lets us build a coalition for change that can help us bring about a long-run transformation toward job creation and equality. In practical terms, it gives

COSATU greater space to engage on issues critical to workers, from the labour laws to the budget, from trade negotiations to the restructuring of state enterprise.

But COSATU will never subordinate workers' needs and views to any other organisation. The Tripartite Alliance brings together three independent organisations, which can and do sometimes disagree. Naturally, this can lead to severe tensions. Workers have their own ideas, and will not sign away their right to use power to support them.

In addition, we will never make workers' unity take second place to our political alliances. Not every COSATU members supports the Alliance parties. The measure of a COSATU activist is her or his willingness to fight for workers' interests, not their views on government.

As unionists, we cannot repeat too often that unity is the basis of workers' strength. An individual worker has no power to stand up to the employer or demand better conditions. Only together can workers improve their situation.

Still, unions cannot limit themselves narrowly to the workplace and turn their back on political alliances. That is a lesson we have learnt, not only from our own history, but from other countries'. Everywhere in the world, the labour movement's relation to the state is crucial, because the law largely shapes the balance between workers and employers. The law makes it easier or harder to organise workers, negotiate and take action. If workers give up on political action, we know what kind of laws employers will push through.

That is why most unions, even those that say they focus narrowly on workplace issues, have a relationship with a major political party. Even where the party isn't perfect, at least it will avoid gutting the labour laws. But when the bosses' parties come into power, watch out: that is when the labour laws will be destroyed, and employers will be able to smash unions.

In the 1970s and '80s, we saw what happened in the U.K. under Thatcher and the U.S. under Reagan. Today, we can see history repeat itself in Australia. There, the conservatives have taken over and are trying to destroy the right to collective bargaining. They want every worker individually to set her or his contract, and they want to virtually eliminate laws against unfair dismissal. We know what that will mean for most workers: less security, worse pay and little in the way of benefits. The government's draft laws are so bad that they have been condemned by the governing body of the International Labour Organisation, which represents employers and governments as well as unions.

This does not mean that unions can never take their political allies for granted. Any powerful political party, including the ANC, is always contested by business. Weak unions find that even their political alliances cannot protect them. Rather, the labour movement must remain unified, well organised and strong to counter the pressure from business on its political partners.

So we come back to the main theme of the labour movement: that solidarity is the only way workers can win. In the public service, there are close to a million workers, but they remain fragmented between unions, federations and sectors. As a result, many workers continue to face low pay, oppressive management and appalling working conditions.

The police know this better than anyone. Five years ago, the unions gave up rank and leg promotions in return for a promise of more equitable career pathing and pay progression. But we have received almost nothing in return. To this day, the employer does not recognise that police should have the right to strike like any other workers. Police management is still often discriminatory and arbitrary. And too many police work in understaffed stations with useless and faulty equipment.

Like other workers, ordinary police men and women need power to ensure real transformation - and that power will come only from unity.

Comrades and friends,

Over the past ten years, public service unions, including the police unions, have faced far-reaching choices on how to engage with the transformation of the public service that became necessary with the transition to a unified, democratic state after 1994.

COSATU has always argued that we must face these choices as real unions, as the collective voice of the workers, and not as staff associations.

Staff associations try to use the details of the rules and regulations to prevent the loss of benefits to those who benefited from the previous regime. Instead of looking for long-run solutions for the majority of public servants, they try to block changes as long as they can. As a result, they have often been marginalised and left to pursue legal strategies, rather than contributing to structural changes that can help both public servants and our communities in the coming years.

In contrast, real unions understand that we cannot hope to defend the inequitable, rigid and oppressive structures we inherited from the past. Rather, workers must use power based on solidarity to demand a new deal for all of us, as both citizens and workers. That means we must focus on public servants' key demands for decent pay and conditions, job security, reasonable treatment by management, skills development, and real career paths that give every worker hope for the future. In the process, we must ensure that public servants, including the police, are better able to serve the people.

Like every union in the public sector, SAPU has to decide its strategy for engagement in the future. We are sure this congress will prove an important step in that process. We look forward to hearing of your success in developing a united, strong and constructive way forward for the police, as workers, as defenders of our communities, and as servants of the public.