Ebrahim Harvey Left field In the first article that I wrote for this paper a year ago, I stated: OThe ANC is on a collision course with its own support base and could suffer come the 2004 election.O This view, expressing the negative impact that the economic policies of the ruling party has on the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and their alliance, was reinforced last week when the Minister of Labour, Membathisi Mdladlana, announced proposed changes to labour legislation that Cosatu leaders claim have plunged relations with the government into the worst political crisis since 1994 and have vowed an all-out fight against it. These amendments, some blatantly anti- working class, have already been approved by the Cabinet and are expected to be endorsed by Parliament at the end of September.
While there are important changes to retrenchment and insolvency laws that afford workers greater protection, the proposals to scrap overtime pay for Sunday work, lengthen ordinary working hours and make it easier for employers to dismiss workers during the first six months is considered to be the biggest attack by the government on labour since 1994. In fact, so blatant is this that the other protective changes pales into little significance, reminding one of LeninOs famous words Oone step forward and two steps backwardsO. At first glance this attack does not make political sense as we are four months away from the local government elections in which the support of Cosatu is of critical importance for the African National Congress. But a closer look will show that there are more profound and powerful forces at work that underlie this apparent anomaly. This was aptly captured by Mdladlana when he said the changes will send Oa clear signal to foreign and local investors that we are seeking to create a labour market that is efficient and stableO. Yet Cosatu said last week that Othe labour market review process has gone horribly wrongO. But Mdladlana is only an instrument of the government and so union leaders who vent their anger against him as the labour OmonsterO or call for his resignation miss the bigger picture. The proposed changes do not issue from him but from the servile attempts by the Cabinet to please foreign investors.
It is important to note at this point that President Thabo Mbeki has earlier bemoaned the fact that, despite the government complying with requirements to attract foreign direct investment, it has trickled in at a snailOs pace. Will more exploitable labour, made possible by not paying overtime on Sundays and working longer hours, lead to a flood of investments? The ANC, and Mbeki in particular, is hell- bent on creating an Oinvestor-friendlyO environment but they do so at the expense of workers in general and their Cosatu ally in particular. This is what often puzzles many analysts and it should not. The ANC has gone too far down the path of neo- liberal economics to make any fundamental reversal in policy and strategy. Instead the relentless logic of globalisation pushes it further and further down that path and in effect against the working class.
No ruling party, especially one who makes revolutionary claims, can equally serve two contending classes. Despite the ANCOs efforts to strike a strategic balancing act between the conflicting interests of labour and capital, the scales of class oscillation tilt inevitably more and more in favour of big business. Anyone who denies this is peddling illusions long ripped apart by the facts. Since the ANC adopted (behind the backs of Cosatu and against its interests) the neo-liberal growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear) in 1996, a critical turning point in its history, it consciously entered upon a path which inevitably leads to the latest attacks. These attacks are further evidence that the ANC is irrevocably tied to a neo-liberal policy regime that cares more about the profiteering interests of investors than it does for the basic needs of workers who, though, no doubt, they will have the nerve to call upon to vote for them in the local government elections, as they will do with workers and communities opposed to its iGoli 2002 plan. But it is the retrogressive change to basic conditions Oscrapping overtime pay for Sunday work and the prospect of increasing normal working hoursO that shows the extent to which the ANC has gone in betraying the black working class. This will have severe implications for its alliance with Cosatu. The attacks are treacherous when seen against the background of CosatuOs campaign for a living wage, a 40-hour working week and poverty eradication, all of which were supported by the ANC and that have not been attained and cannot be within the Gear capitalist framework. The effect of denying overtime pay on Sundays and extending normal working hours will be to further drive down real wages and living standards and increase hardships for workers. The double-time paid for Sunday work helps augment poor wages and is the main reason why workers are willing to work on this day.
This represents an unacceptable attack on what Cosatu and other unions have fought hard and long for, or gained over the years. If Cosatu does not now wake up to the need to part ways with the ANC and assert its own class and organisational independence, not at all possible within the ANC-dominated alliance, it will effectively be forced, one way or another, to compromise the basic needs and hard-won gains of its members, which will inevitably give rise to a serious struggle within it which could sadly split the federation. Who can seriously still talk about a Obattle for the soul of the ANCO? This was won as far back as 1996 by a basically conservative black nationalist petit bourgeois leadership, led by Mbeki, who had the temerity to cynically say Oyou can call me a ThatcheriteO when the Gear strategy was adopted and that signalled that victory.
The only way forward for Cosatu must now be very clear: leave the alliance and forge a new democratic socialist workersO party, either with or without the support of the South African Communist Party, who is too sullied and compromised by its Stalinist past to be rehabilitated to play that role. Not surprisingly, it was reported that the party, whose role is to keep Cosatu contained and controlled within the alliance, expressed disappointment with its strong response to the proposed changes. Not surprising because party leaders who are Cabinet ministers approved these changes.
Let us hope that Cosatu draws the necessary conclusions at their seventh national congress next month which, in the light of these and other developments, will be its most important. Surely the time for being electoral fodder for the ruling party is over.
Howard Barrell is on vacation. Over A Barrel will be back in a fortnight