The union insider who doesn’t want unions

TITLE: Maverick Insider AUTHOR: Johnny Copelyn REVIEWER: Loyiso Sidimba

THE trade union movement has been good to unionist-turned-millionnaire Johnny Copelyn.

He has made most of his money – R913-million according to independent research organisation Who Owns Whom – running Hosken Consolidated Investments (HCI), the investment firm majority owned by the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union.

In Maverick Insider, Copelyn charts his rise from the young Wits University graduate who walked into a job as Textile Workers Industrial Union (TWIU) organiser in Durban to one of the richest South Africans.

“I suppose you could say we were the latest in the breed of middleclass white students who had come to help,” he writes of his early years at TWIU. White saviour complex? Perhaps. Strangely, Copelyn, who worked with President Jacob Zuma’s cousin Obed, refused to allow TWIU organisers to do ANC underground work in the fight against apartheid.

“I was pretty hostile to this idea,” he writes, “I could foresee the union getting dragged into underground activity, which would put all our trade union work at risk.”

He finally admits: “I was simply not cut out for underground work.”

Copelyn is also chairman of HCIowned television channel e.tv.

Workers, including journalists, at the country’s first 24-hour television news service have been waging an admirable battle to be unionised.

Those interested in South African trade union history will enjoy Maverick Insider. Let’s just hope other unionists of that era will follow suit and tell their stories.