Conspiracy and conflict stalk Numsa
The National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) has lost the plot. Its challenges are deepened by ideological confusion, a rift among its leaders since before its 2016 national congress, and money woes.
Numsa was the biggest and among the wealthiest unions in the country, but the combination of problems it now faces is leading it down a path of self-destruction.
The 2013 resolution by Numsa, then a Cosatu affiliate, to stop campaigning for the ANC, call on Cosatu to split from the alliance and form a worker party to contest future elections marked the beginning of an important point in our political history.
It formed part of the long unravelling of the labour movement as well as the governing alliance, whose future hangs in the balance, depending on the outcome of the ANC’s national conference in December. The “Numsa moment” was for many an opportunity to form a genuine left alternative to compete against the ANC. But that opportunity was lost by the union leadership.
Now Numsa faces allegations it has been “captured” by a US contractor running a company called ThoughtWorks. The union has suspended the equivalent of its chief operations officer for her alleged role in penning an open letter containing the allegations and challenging the Numsa leadership.
The letter is bizarre, alleging that those running ThoughtWorks set up a media organisation called Pan Africa Today to manipulate politics in SA and Zambia. The tactics of the head of the company, Roy Singh, are likened to those of the Gupta family. The letter’s author also compares the relationship between general secretary Irvin Jim and the company to that of President Jacob Zuma and the Guptas.
The irony is delicious, since Jim was among the first in Cosatu and the alliance to turn on Zuma after the ANC’s 2012 Mangaung conference. The letter alleges that Jim is surrounded by “consultants, academics and everyone except those in the union”, that his co-leaders in the union are never with him, and that he is surrounded by “young girls with no politics”.
But the most harrowing allegation is that “he does not take workers seriously and bypasses worker leaders except when he needs them in his factional battles”.
During Numsa’s long battle within Cosatu, it was imperative that its leaders remained united. They did so, and when eventually expelled from Cosatu at the end of 2014 they rallied around to forge their own identity outside the federation they helped build.
Since then differences over the ideological direction of the worker party the union agreed to form, and the identity of the union itself, began eroding the united front at the top.
Jim and his deputy, Karl Cloete, are now at odds. Other officials remain silent in the face of excesses they witness. These issues were glossed over when the union was flush with cash and its structures were kept content enough to ignore the war brewing at headquarters.
However, the loss of agency fees and a membership audit that cleaned out its system resulted in a cash crunch. This was worsened by huge retrenchments in the sectors in which it organises.
While Numsa’s ideological orientation has always been contested, the union is now faced with outsiders seeking to determine its direction, taking away the voice of its ordinary members.
Jim’s secretariat report to its central committee meeting this week is like no other report delivered at a union in SA. It barely touches on real issues facing workers. Rather, it opines about global politics and controversies, the South African Communist Party, the ANC, Marxist feminism — and this gem:
“Every TV, cellphone, laptop and internet-connected device, even when turned off and disconnected, is a spying device. The mission of the CIA, ‘Collect It All’, is to gather all data on every citizen in the world from birth to death.
“Citizens lose both privacy and all pretence of the right to privacy. A million top security-clearance bureaucrats read their e-mails, collect all their photos, watch them secretly on their video cameras, listen to them in their living rooms and analyse their networks of friends,” reads the report.
“Even 5-million spies cannot possibly analyse that amount of big data, so machine learning is now applied to find patterns, identify suspects, modify behaviour and put names on the weekly Tuesday drone-assassination list.”
This is hardly the kind of secretariat report one expects from a union in the midst of a difficult bargaining season in a country in recession.
When Numsa left the alliance, it noted it was sinking. Now it is clear it has not escaped the whirlpool. The consequences will be dire for workers if it does not walk away from the strange world Jim has thrust it into.
THE MISSION OF THE CIA … IS TO GATHER ALL DATA ON EVERY CITIZEN IN THE WORLD FROM BIRTH TO DEATH Irvin Jim Numsa general secretary