A casual observer at the Congress of South African Trade Unions’s conference in Midrand this week could be forgiven for thinking it was an African National Congress affair. Political debates and sloganeering dominated — perhaps inevitably, given that elections are round the corner.
But Cosatu’s future will be dictated by more than how it crafts it engagement with the ruling ANC and its membership of the “tripartite alliance”.
Its leaders recognise this — they know that if Cosatu is to be taken seriously by the ANC, the federation and its component unions will have to be greatly strengthened. In the build-up to the congress they tried to make sure that organisational issues took pride of place on the agenda.
Attention has been refocused on Cosatu’s almost forgotten September commission, whose watershed report on the challenges facing the labour movement in the post-1994 period was released six years ago.
Said Cosatu president Willie Madisha in his opening address: “The core of our work at this congress is to build our organisations.
“We must leave here with a programme of action that not only points to key areas for political and economic engagement but, even more importantly, defines how we can build our organisation in the face of the loss of jobs. This can undermine the working class.”
The haemorrhage of jobs by South Africa’s formal economy has eroded Cosatu’s membership. But just as important for the future of labour is the changing nature of the country’s working population.
One congress observer argued that the working class was being restructured not by the government, but by business. The growth of casual labour, the service sector and the informal economy, coupled with the dramatic shrinkage of its traditional base, pose a major threat to the labour movement.
Research by Wits University’s Sociology of Work Project (Swop) has increasingly highlighted the growth of informal work, including home-based industry and street vending.
For what analysts describe as “the new poor”, work does not entail a regular income. Indeed, many receive no cash income at all, but payment in kind.
Wits sociology professor Eddie Webster argues that these trends are creating a “crisis of representation” for trade unions, which are losing their ability to provide a voice for millions of poor people.
To a limited extent, union organising strategies have reflected the changes. When it was formed in 1985, the federation was based four-square on blue-collar workers in manufacturing and mining. But in the early 1990s its ranks were swollen by large public sector unions, after these were granted formal collective bargaining rights.
Since its last national congress in 2000 Cosatu has begun to target white-collar and professional employees, such as musicians, actors, athletes and medical doctors.
Facing a resources crunch, attempts to grow the number of affiliates and recruit different kinds of formal workers makes immediate practical sense for labour. How sustainable the strategy is politically and organisationally in the longer term is open to question. After all, music and sport can hardly be described as the “commanding heights of the economy”.
In his secretariat report general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi summarised the Cosatu’s central difficulty. “Politically, the need for political unity among the working class cannot be overemphasised. Capital, opposition political parties and our rivals have tried to set organised workers against the unemployed. Yet the fact is that unions are designed directly to represent workers, not other groups.”
In recent research Swop’s Sarah Mosoetsa argued that, in the absence of formal sector jobs, communities and households were being forced to explore alternative livelihood strategies.
These included new alliances and networks aimed at reducing the impact of poverty, rising unemployment, lack of basic resources and HIV/Aids, some them answering the description of “social movements”.
A congress resolution significantly acknowledges the growth of issue-specific social movements — the Treatment Action Campaign, the Anti-Privatisation Forum and anti-eviction committees in the Western Cape, and others are burgeoning in South Africa.
Opinion among delegates was divided. Some saw social movements as a threat to the tripartite alliance; others called for closer engagement with them.
However, there was a broad acknowledgement that many issues taken up by the host of new organisations affected workers and could not be ignored.
Cosatu’s eighth congress coincides with the emergence of bewildering new forces in the labour market. Will it rise to the challenge?
Renee Grawitzky is editor of the SA Labour Bulletin.