Last rites, not a lap of honour, for once-proud unions

Acouple of once-powerful trade unions and worker federations are headed for their national congresses this year, but one gets the sense that these gatherings will not lead to the renewal of organised labour as a formidable political force in SA.

If anything, at the congresses we are likely to witness the funeral processions of many of these organisations.

The news that the president and other national officebearers of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) have written to their general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, notifying him of their intention to suspend him, generated much media attention this week.

That Saftu’s bosses allege that Vavi abused a federation credit card made the issue more interesting, given that he was accused of that in 2006 when he was Cosatu leader.

He denied the allegations back then and was later cleared by an internal Cosatu investigation amid claims by his sympathisers that the charges were trumped up by then-Cosatu president Willie Madisha and others who were opposed to Vavi’s use of his powerful post to give backing to Jacob Zuma’s bid to become ANC president.

Once again, Vavi is denying the claims levelled against him, this time by the Saftu national office-bearers, and says this is a ploy by his one-time staunch backer Irvin Jim, general secretary of metalworkers’ union Numsa, with whom he has fallen out over whether the federation should be an “independent” trade union or, like Cosatu, throw its weight behind a political party.

Vavi and Jim were central to the establishment of Saftu as an alternative to Cosatu following a political battle within the ANC-aligned federation that saw Numsa expelled for refusing to continue backing the ruling party, and for insisting on encroaching on industries that were dominated by other Cosatu affiliates.

Their decision to break away, taking a couple of industrial affiliates of Cosatu with them, effectively reconfigured the labour movement landscape in the country and severely weakened Cosatu’s hand within the tripartite alliance. It also meant that the ANC’s election machinery was starved of the electoral funding that came from Numsa, a union with very deep pockets.

Like Cosatu and some of its unions, such as the National Union of Mineworkers, Saftu and Numsa are scheduled to hold national congresses in the coming months. Both Vavi and Jim are up for re-election and each is said to suspect the other of trying to remove him.

But to focus only on the Vavi vs Jim affair, or the current standoff between the Saftu general secretary and the rest of the federation’s bosses, would be to miss what has been happening to the country’s worker movement.

In the early 1990s, faced with foreign anti-apartheid donor funding drying up following the unbanning of the ANC and the anticipated end to the oppressive system, several major unions established investment arms in a bid to remain financially stable and independent.

A number of these investment vehicles have proven to be of great benefit to the unions and their members. There are thousands of children of mineworkers and textile workers, for instance, who are today university graduates thanks to bursaries from union investment companies.

Also true, unfortunately, is that, often, the investment companies have been turned into self-enrichment schemes by union bosses and the CEOs who run them.

“A working-class hero is something to be,” they’d agree with John Lennon. But not because, like the music legend, they are self-confessed dreamers. They’d do so because it gives them access to wealth without actually becoming the capitalists they are supposed to despise.

Imagine that.

Hence much of the intense leadership contestation in the unions is less about who can best represent the interests of their members to employers, and more about control of the investment arms and even access to the boards of some pension funds.

Karl Marx famously said that in the industrial working class, the bourgeoisie produces “its own grave diggers”. He said this in the firm belief that the proletariat, tired of being exploited for super-profits, would eventually overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism.

Last Monday marked 129 years since Marx’s death, and there is still no sign that the fall of the bourgeoisie “and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable”.

What is clear, though, at least in this corner of Africa, is that by establishing union investment arms, unions produced their “own grave diggers”, and their future is going to be characterised by the formation of more splinter unions, diminishing influence and eventual death.

In a world where technological advancements are increasingly rendering millions of jobs — especially labour-intensive activities — obsolete, it is difficult to see how the labour movement can survive its current crisis.