Change doesn’t happen overnight, but Spoornet’s new managers are confident about the future, writes Gaye Davis
ON the soccer field at the Vasco da Gama sports club in Parow, teams of men are competing in events involving buckets of water and sliding along lengths of black plastic while the smell of potjiekos and the sound of sakkie-sakkie music fill the air.
It’s Transnet’s Family Day, and members of the organisation’s various divisions in the Western Cape have gathered to eat, drink and beat the merry hell out of each other in friendly combat. There are burly men in aprons that say ”Real Meat — Real Food” and others in rugby jerseys with Springbok emblems pronking on their chests. Couples dance lang-arm as an old South African flag flutters from a makeshift flagpole.
It’s by no means an all-white affair, but the occasion bears the unmistakable stamp of a culture that enjoyed its heyday in the days when, if you were white, male and Afrikaans-speaking, you knew there’d be a job for you on the railways, just as there had been for your father and grandfather.
But those days were before 1990, when the state- owned South African Transport Services became Transnet, a public company concerned more with making a profit than providing sheltered employment for a particular race group. The old South African Railways became Spoornet, and Gerald Boshoff, senior human resources manager in the Cape, was among senior staffers called in by Transnet MD Dr Anton Moolman.
”He said change the company from a chauvinist white male culture to an indigenous South African one. There was so much wrong with the company. It was rule-bound, authoritarian … We were the custodians of apartheid, we kept it in place.”
Boshoff and his colleagues visited England and talked to the Equal Opportunities Commission. And they started confronting the racism and exclusivity entrenched in virtually every nook and cranny of the organisation.
They took flak. Their families got death threats. ”What we had to do was change conservative whites’ thinking … open up what we found in terms of unequal facilities.”
A shrinking economy meant lower volumes of traffic, forcing a rationalisation of assets and pruning of a bloated workforce. In 1991, when Transnet’s affirmative action policy found expression in its Turn Strategy document, it employed more than 162 000 people. Under its four-year Manpower Utilisation Programme, now ended, jobs were cut by a third.
Spoornet is the largest of Transnet’s divisions, carrying freight, containers and passengers by rail. It now employs just over 65 000 people. When Patrick Dada, the man now in charge of driving the Turn Strategy and one of a crop of new, deft, black managers, arrived at Spoornet in 1993, he found an organisation ”totally traumatised” by the job cuts.
He had his own problems: the culture shock of working with people whose only experience of black people ”was with those who brought them tea”. The 13-point Turn Strategy, aimed at transforming the organisation into an equal opportunity company with a 70 percent black to 30 percent white employment ratio by the year 2000 looked good but was still ”just paper”.
Spoornet was in the throes of restructuring its rail services, putting in place entrepreneurs to inject a new approach, a quantum leap from that of the technocrats who believed that ”if you had trains and tracks in good order, you got custom” and ran things like a government department. Fear, suspicion and uncertainty inside the organisation echoed that in the general body politic as the country lurched towards a negotiated settlement.
Dada and his colleagues started tackling management on making the Turn Strategy something more ”than a PR exercise”. It was apparent immediately the unions had to be on board, ”though we knew top management wouldn’t be comfortable with this,” recalls Dada. Consulting the seven Spoornet unions began in 1993: they are represented on Transnet’s national Turn Strategy Council and its regional counterparts, overseeing the affirmative action process. Jobs are now allocated on the basis of two black appointments for every white one and people must be promoted from within the company where possible.
Taking Transnet as a whole, employment patterns now reflect significant entry of black employees — mainly at management and professional level. The Turn Strategy focuses on bringing black people into the higher grades, still dominated by whites. The job cuts, however, saw unskilled workers mostly affected — and most of them were black.
Dada says having more black managers in key positions is essential. ”People are stars and they’re black and the whites say things like, ‘I never knew you people could also think’.”
The company sets aside five percent of its salary and wages bill on training, ranging from adult basic education to specialised skills; last year 80 000 Transnet employees, most of whom were black, received some kind of training. Spoornet is looking at evaluating skills on the basis of competency rather than qualifications.
While unions say industrial relations have improved, officials say little has changed on the shop floor. Researcher Ian Macun of Wits University’s sociology department feels the rapidity of change and severity of the downsizing has created a climate of insecurity in which developing a new culture can only take second
Robert Prince, regional manager of the Turn Strategy Council in the Western Cape, recognises the length of the road ahead: ”There’s a sense of optimism at management level,” says Prince. ”But on the shop floor you still find racism — though we send a clear message it’s unacceptable.”
Dada is frank about the many problems that must still be worked through. ”We’ve got weak first-line management, so implementing changes is difficult. You get AWB supervisors, and managers feel vulnerable and exposed. But we’re looking at addressing this through rewarding people for being part of the process.”
The upside is that business is better than ever before. Spoornet’s annual report for 1995 reflects a net profit of R734-million, up on the previous year’s R576-million. Productivity has gone up eight percent since the company was formed.
For Dada, getting Spoornet on track involves more than ensuring the country has an efficient rail network to serve a growing economy: ”This country’s got new owners and I’ve helped put them there democratically. By failing, I make them fail too.”
Says Boshoff: ”You don’t wipe out 300 years of discrimination and suspicion in two or three years. But the process has made me optimistic for the country. You see guys from conservative Afrikaner backgrounds sharing the same vision as guys with ANC or communist backgrounds. It’s shown me we can survive and prosper, not as black and white, but as South Africans. We have our ups and downs, but the trend of the graph is up.”