Cape Town - “This is not the union I lived and worked with,” explained a former National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa) organiser when he heard that all financial matters relating to the union were to be held behind closed doors at its 10th national congress on Wednesday.
He was also reacting to what he saw as two days of “political preaching”.
What he highlighted was the fact that the exclusion of the media from today’s sessions in Cape Town went against the tradition of Numsa and, in particular, that of the Metal and Allied Workers’ Union (Mawu) that was at the heart of the union. It was formed after a merger with several, generally more conservative, unions.
Mawu was the militant core of the early Numsa and the first elected general secretary of the newly merged union was Moses Mayekiso. He was a Mawu activist and regional secretary who was at the time in prison facing a treason charge.
Mayekiso, classified as a “workerist”, incurred the wrath of both the apartheid state and the exiled ANC and SA Communist Party (SACP). He was both an effective union organiser, a community activist, and opposed to the soviet orientation of the SACP.
Apart from the demand for a “workers’ charter” and a “workers’ party” the “workerists” insisted on a form of extreme democracy, starting within the union. The office bearers were all elected and recallable by the members and, most importantly, earned no more than the highest paid worker.
Officials of the union also forewent their pay along with members when they were on strike. It was, perhaps, an idealistic system and did not always operate efficiently, but it was the goal that Mawu and the early Numsa held to.
This insistence on accountability and transparency remained even as most of the militant anti-apartheid unions came under the umbrella of Cosatu. And finance was always the central feature that some wished to hide.
That ideal of transparency corroded steadily throughout the labour movement, especially as unions began to dabble with investment companies. Today, Numsa, while professing to symbolise a new start and a new, revolutionary, way forward, merely fell into step.
But then, as some shop stewards noted, the stress on a workers’ party and on “Marxism-Leninism” may also indicate that Numsa is repeating the mistakes of the past; mistakes such as when the Congress of the People (COPE) broke away from the ANC in order to “recapture the spirit of the ANC”. It came to be referred to as ANC-Lite.
The stress by the Numsa leadership on “Marxist-Leninist” ideological purity, coupled with direct attacks on the ANC and, especially the SACP, may be seen as an attempt to create SACP-Super Strong. To mix metaphors, that would be another attempt to reinvent the wheel.
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